Compact Particle Accelerator Sets New World Record
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have accelerated subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded from a compact accelerator - a laser-plasma accelerator, which is a new class of particle accelerators that can fit on a table. The team used a specialized petawatt laser and a charged-particle gas called plasma to get the particles up to speed - electrons in this case - inside a nine-centimeter long tube of plasma. The speed corresponded to an energy of 4.25 giga-electron volts. The acceleration over such a short distance corresponds to an energy gradient 1000 times greater than traditional particle accelerators and marks a world record energy for laser-plasma accelerators. read more