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futurity_sci_tech 00888.txt

#This electron accelerator is smaller than a grain of rice Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mike Ross-Stanford on September 30 2013researchers have 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. e still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forcessays Joel England a physicist with the US Department of energy s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford university who led the experiments. t could also help enable compact accelerators and X-ray devices for security scanning medical therapy and imaging and research in biology and materials science. ecause it employs commercial lasers and low-cost mass-production techniques the researchers believe it will set the stage for new generations of abletopaccelerators. At its full potential the new ccelerator on a chipcould match the accelerating power of SLAC s 2-mile-long linear accelerator in just 100 feet and deliver a million more electron pulses per second. This initial demonstration reported in the journal Nature achieved an acceleration gradient or amount of energy gained per length of the accelerator of 300 million electronvolts per meter. That s roughly 10 times the acceleration provided by the current SLAC linear accelerator. ur ultimate goal for this structure is one billion electronvolts per meter and we re already one-third of the way in our first experimentsaid Stanford applied physics Professor Robert Byer the principal investigator for this research. Today s accelerators use microwaves to boost the energy of electrons. Researchers have been looking for more economical alternatives and this new technique which uses ultrafast lasers to drive the accelerator is a leading candidate. Particles are accelerated generally in two stages. First they are boosted to nearly the speed of light. Then any additional acceleration increases their energy but not their speed; this is the challenging part. In the accelerator-on-a-chip experiments electrons are accelerated first to near light-speed in a conventional accelerator. Then they are focused into a tiny half-micron-high channel within a glass chip just half a millimeter long. The channel had earlier been patterned with precisely spaced nanoscale ridges. Infrared laser light shining on the pattern generates electrical fields that interact with the electrons in the channel to boost their energy. View animation for more detail. Turning the accelerator on a chip into a full-fledged tabletop accelerator will require a more compact way to get the electrons up to speed before they enter the device. A collaborating research group in Germany led by Peter Hommelhoff at Friedrich Alexander University and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has been looking for such a solution. It simultaneously reports in Physical Review Letters its success in using a laser to accelerate lower energy electrons. Applications for these new particle accelerators would go well beyond particle physics research. Byer says laser accelerators could drive compact X-ray free-electron lasers comparable to SLAC s Linac Coherent light Source that are all-purpose tools for a wide range of research. Another possible application is small portable X-ray sources to improve medical care for people injured in combat as well as to provide more affordable medical imaging for hospitals and laboratories. That s one of the goals of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency s Advanced X-ray Integrated Sources program which partially funded this research. Primary funding for this research is from the US Department of energy Office of Science. The study s lead authors were Stanford graduate students Edgar Peralta and Ken Soong. Additional contributors included researchers from the University of California-Los angeles and Tech-X Corp. in Boulder Colo. Source: Stanford Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license

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