Brilliant method there to put a particle accelerator on a chip!
ATOM SMASHER ON A CHIP technology demonstrated
Stanford uni scientists have created a particle accelerator on a chip smaller than a grain of rice (albeit one that won't actually accelerate particles). The details are in heavyweight boffinry mag Nature, in a paper titled Demonstration of electron acceleration in a laser-driven dielectric microstructure. Particle …
-
Monday 30th September 2013 13:00 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Cut it some SLAC
> First, you must get the electrons up to speed and then ramp up their energy using electric fields and a precisely engineered tube of ridges
That is because after a "suitably high" energy, the speed doesn't change much because of "that speed limit".
This wouldn't make an "atom smasher" either (no hadrons), but if you add:
1) An antielectron source
2) The calorimeters and other detector stuff
you might get a Small Electron-Positron Collider or a Small SLAC which can be fun.
-
-
Monday 30th September 2013 13:32 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Well, that cool
A time-machine microwave? Get me John Titor on the horn!
-
Monday 30th September 2013 13:36 GMT Mage
Re: Well, that cool
Yes, the ultimate non-replaceable phone "battery" you won't worry about replacing. A power source that lasts for 5 years screen time would be good.
Why does a Smart phone battery go flat quickly? Screen is 80% of power consumption.
I wonder what you could do with a large 2D array of these "rice grain" accelerators?
-
-
-
-
Monday 30th September 2013 18:15 GMT John Smith 19
So kind of a Smith Purcell generator in *reverse*
Neat.
Except here we fire the electrons below the grating (or at least in between 2 gratings).
Let's factor this is a 100x more intense field strength than conventional accelerators.
That puts a similar capacity to existing accelerators 1/100 the size of existing ones.
-
-
Thursday 3rd October 2013 12:04 GMT John Smith 19
Now I wonder if this works with Protons as well.
Trickier to get a source but if so you can now accelerate Electrons and Protons, which can give Neutrons.
Obvious uses. High efficiency compact X ray sources. IE 10-20x better than conventional X-ray tubes.
But the big one is desktop fusion.
Just a thought.