{"id":343702,"date":"2025-12-12T04:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T04:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/343702\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T04:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T04:50:07","slug":"step-into-my-particle-accelerator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/343702\/","title":{"rendered":"Step Into My Particle Accelerator"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you\u2019ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you\u2019ll often find that the power supply was in another room and the cooling system was in yet another. So when you get a computer that fit on, say, a large desk and maybe have a few tape drives all together in a normal-sized office, people thought of it as \u201csmall.\u201d We\u2019re seeing a similar evolution in particle accelerators, which, a new startup company says, can be room-sized<\/a> according to a post by [Charles Q. Choi] over at IEEE Spectrum.<\/p>\n

Usually, when you think of a particle accelerator, you think of a giant housing like the 3.2-kilometer-long SLAC accelerator<\/a>. That\u2019s because these machines use magnets to accelerate the particles, and just like a car needs a certain distance to get to a particular speed, you have to have room for the particle to accelerate to the desired velocity.<\/p>\n

A relatively new technique, though, doesn\u2019t use magnets. Instead, very powerful (but very short) laser pulses create plasma from gas. The plasma oscillates in the wake of the laser, accelerating electrons to relativistic speeds. These so-called wakefield accelerators can, in theory, produce very high-energy electrons and don\u2019t need much space to do it.<\/p>\n

The startup company, TAU Systems, is about to roll out a commercial system that can generate 60 to 100 MeV at 100 Hz. They also intend to increase the output over time. For reference, SLAC generates 50,000 MeV. But, then again, it takes two miles of raceway to do it.<\/p>\n

The initial market is likely to be radiation testing for space electronics. Higher energies will open the door to next-generation X-ray lithography for IC production, and more. There are likely applications for accelerated electrons that we don\u2019t see today because it isn\u2019t feasible to generate them without a massive facility.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, don\u2019t get your checkbook out yet. The units will cost about $10 million at the bottom end. Still a bargain compared to the alternatives.<\/p>\n

You can do some of this now on a chip<\/a>. Particle accelerators have come a long way<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Photo from Tau Systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-343702","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}