A path toward more powerful tabletop accelerators
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 - 13:31
in Physics & Chemistry
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. The research, from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is presented as the cover story in the May special issue of Physics of Plasmas.