Accelerator On a Chip: Technology Could Spawn New Generations of Smaller, Less Expensive Devices for

In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.

"It could also help enable compact accelerators and X-ray devices for security scanning, medical therapy and imaging, and research in biology and materials science."

This is amazing, it's as small as a grain of rice...

technology evolving rapidly before our eyes. I cannot wait for the next half century of continues accelerating growth.








www.sciencedaily.com...

www6.slac.stanford.edu...

A grain of rice huh?

And how much time and money was wasted building the LHC?

reply to post by MysterX


Apples, oranges. This is for accelerating electrons only in an environment/scale where a more standard HV accelerator would be tough or impossible. The xray machine at your dentist is also an electron accelerator, as is any old CRT monitor you've got laying around. They're not quite the same as the LHC either.

However, it dawns on me that if the math is right on this thing, it might spell my fourth SLAG this year if I can get to it. Maybe the most assignable one.

reply to post by MysterX


yeah you want to eat a bowl full?

MysterX
A grain of rice huh?

And how much time and money was wasted building the LHC?

I wish I could as easily mis understand things like this.

Awesome job tho Impressively misunderstood!

OP, Awesome thread too! crazy!

I bet the tunneling guys at CERN are sighing long and hard about now

Thats a pretty cool find, if cheap enough to produce you could hand them out - could you imagine that in science class, Bunsen buner, test tubes, lasers and your own personal particle accelerator! awesome!

Ahem...it's dificult to tell online, but i was actually being facetious.

I realise they are not the same thing.

Still...a star for you wino for making me laugh!

Pretty nice, though id be interested to what energy and more importantly what luminosity the accelerated electrons are. Brilliant idea and the development will be a great step forward!

Since there was a pretty ignorant and very standard "Har Har the LHC was a waste" comment above, I should point out that firstly, this device is accelerating electrons... not protons. So let me pose this question.

Q. Do you know what happens when a high energy particle passes through a material?

A. It deposits energy

simple right? well yes, and so simple that if you was to do high luminosity electron beams passing through a chip, rather than a vacuum cavity, I think you would probably end up with a melted, severely radiation damaged chip.

The Detectors at CERN are looking for very rare events, so scientists require a lot of statistics. This requires very high luminosity beams such that you are guaranteed to get a lot of collisions per bunch train. This is all done within a vacuum tube. In other accelerators such as at the J-PARC facility in Japan, where you extract protons from a beam and focus them onto a graphite target in order to generate neutrinos, once again because neutrinos do not interact so readily, you need to create a lot of them to make the whole venture worth while. In terms of protons per pulse the J-PARC facility holds the world record at something like 10^14 protons per pulse.

Q. What happens to the 90cm long graphite target and tungsten target window if the cooling fails?

A. It shatters due to thermal shock from all the energy deposited.

So to turn this into a useful accelerator in the conventional sense, there is a lot to do.


oh and for the record... the LHC cost 20Billion over about 15 years to build (including detectors and infrastructure upgrades i think....and was funded by 111 different nations. So lets just say that... if you taxed the church for a year you could probably build 2 or 3 ish of them oh and by the way, if all American women stopped using lib balm for a year, you could probably donate the US share of it in a year.

food for thought before people keep spreading ignorance instead of denying it.