Boffins build powerful yet 'table-top size' atom-smasher

Woah! That was a confusing explanation.

Really, does the "explaining to kids" strategy work?

I didn't understand ANYTHING.

So we could have sharks

with frikkin' particle beams instead?

sounds cool

But have seen the *size* of the desktop?

Slightly more seriously looks like the sort of thing people are talking about to expose the next generation of silicon chips.

Although 40TW does not sound a small laser to me.

"...you can put on your kitchen table."

OI! Where's my portable particle beam cannon you bastards?

Wee accelerators

Don't cross the streams!

Next

iSmash Cyclotron Tablet

It might be built powerfully...

... but is it powerfully built?

You wouldn't want to use it for disco lights

Those are some powerful X-rays they emit

(Sorry to be the party pooper)

Great timing!

I wonder if these guys will be at Burning Man?

My own Hadron Collider?! :)

So how long before I can have my own Small Hadron Collider. ;)

?Berkeley labs?

You only used it one additional time in the article. Exactly how much extra wear and tear did you you subject your parenthesis keys, and was it worth it?

All this talk...

...about waves and surfing and you want me to believe it will not fit in a sharks head.

Interesting article, BUT

the comparison with the Large Hadron Collider - «doing the sort of research the Large Hadron Collider is doing right now» is misleading if taken literally. According to the «Nature Physics» abstract, «[t]he technique relies on a single laser pulse powering a plasma structure with a tailored longitudinal density profile, to produce beams that can be tuned in the range of 100– 400 MeV with per-cent-level stability, using laser pulses of less than 40 TW». The LHC, on the other hand, is designed to reach energy levels of some 7 TeV, or about 18-70 thousand times greater. So it seems unlikely that they'll be filling in those 27 km of tunnels on the Franco-Swiss border with landfill just now....

Henri

Some particles are more equal than others

So these eggheads can now shoot scads of wispy little electrons at whatever. Great. The hadrons should get a charge out of it for sure, but they won't get smashed unless they start sniffing gluons.