A new design is looking to scale down particle accelerators in a major way.
Using laser light and an ‘accelerator on a chip’ design, the search for parallel universes and the ‘God particle’ could soon take place in an area the size of a shoebox.
more…
CrazyNeutrino said:
Could mini particle smashers help find a parallel universe? Scientists reveal plans to create a powerful ‘shoebox-sized Cern’A new design is looking to scale down particle accelerators in a major way.
Using laser light and an ‘accelerator on a chip’ design, the search for parallel universes and the ‘God particle’ could soon take place in an area the size of a shoebox.
more…
I’ve heard of proposals for small scale accelerators before, but not this small! More like a quarter to a tenth of the size of the LHC. The standard way to scale down an accelerator is to use massive voltages. Van-der-Graaf style accelerators use voltages up to and exceeding a million volts. Because acceleration is proportional to voltage, increasing the voltage is the simplest way to increase particle energy. But still, that’s a factor of a million short of achieving energies like those in the LHC.
“Current accelerators use microwaves to propel particles. Microwaves have a long wavelength and take up more space. In the new experiments, scientists replaced microwaves with laser light, which shone on a silica glass chip and interacted with ridges in a microscopic tunnel.”
Nice. The wavelength of laser light is roughly ten thousand times shorter than that of microwaves. I don’t see how it could be done, but I don’t see any fundamental objections, apart from lower throughput.