Not quite. But scientists a the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, along with researchers at Oxford, have used a process called laser wakefield acceleration to accelerate electron beams to energies exceeding a billion electron volts (1GeV) in just 3.3 centimeters.
They think they could make a 10GeV accelerator that’s only a metre along, with perhaps 30 metres of laser path. By way of comparison, while SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, boosts electrons to 50 GeV, it needs a distance of 3.2 kilometres to do it.
As the press release says:
While it’s been said that laser wakefield acceleration promises high-energy accelerators on a tabletop, the real thing may not be quite that small. But laser wakefield acceleration does indeed promise electron accelerators potentially far more powerful than any existing machine — neatly tucked inside a small building.
Amazing.
