A Path toward More Powerful Tabletop Accelerators
Laser light needn’t be as precise as previously thought to drive new breed of miniature particle accelerators, say Berkeley Lab researchers.
Making a tabletop particle accelerator just got easier. A new study shows that certain requirements for the lasers used in an emerging type of small-area particle accelerator can be significantly relaxed. Researchers hope the finding could bring about a new era of accelerators that would need just a few meters to bring particles to great speeds, rather than the many kilometers required of traditional accelerators. (more…)