Move over LHC: This particle accelerator is just 10 cm long

 [This is a transcript with links to references.]

You’ve probably heard that particle physicists would really, really like to have a new particle collider, one that can reach even higher energies that the Large Hadron Collider, the currently most powerful particle accelerator in the world. And this new breakthrough which I just read about the other day might make their dream come true.

The biggest problem with particle colliders is that they’re big, because that makes them very, very expensive. They’re big because accelerating particles to high energies requires a lot of strong magnets in sequence. This is why the large hadron collider is a ring with circumference of a whopping 27 kilometres. The next bigger collider that CERN wants to build would be 100 kilometres long.

In the new paper now, they were testing a completely different way to accelerate particles. It’s called “wakesurfing”. The idea is similar to surfing in the wake of a boat. To make particles wakesurf, you create a plasma from some gas, and shoot a laser through it. The laser creates a distortion in the plasma that moves with almost the speed of light. You can then inject particles into this rapidly moving plasma-distortion. The strong electric and magnetic fields in the wake of the laser shot accelerate the particles.

This idea has been around for some time, but the authors of the recent paper added a new trick which is incredibly cool. First, they created the wake with the Texas Petawatt Laser but then they injected nanoparticles into the wake of the laser shot. These nanoparticles release electrons into the wake which significantly increases the electric field, and with that, the acceleration.

In two of their 23 shots, the electrons reached energies of about 10 Giga electron Volt. Without using nanoparticles, it was just about 2. It actually worked better than they expected! In the paper, they write: “we do not have a satisfactory model or experimental explanation for the generation of such high electron energies”

Yes, the Large Hadron Collider makes it to almost 7 Tera electron Volts per beam, that’s a factor onethousand more, but they did it in just 10 centimetres. I’m known to be very critical of particle physics but really, I feel somewhat misunderstood. All I’m saying is that bigger isn’t always better.