In a first, chip-scale accelerators revved up electrons while also confining them into a beam.
Two teams of physicists have built tiny structures that both accelerate electrons and keep them confined in a manageable beam, instead of spewing them willy-nilly. That’s a first for such mini accelerators, and a crucial step toward making these devices more useful and widespread.
Constructed on silicon chips, the accelerators are composed of two rows of pillars about 2 micrometers tall, reminiscent of miniature rows of skyscrapers. When hit with laser light, the pillar structure generates electromagnetic fields that push the subatomic particles faster and faster along an extremely narrow alley between the pillars, less than a micrometer wide.of energy over a distance of half a millimeter, a 43 percent bump that brought the particles to 40.
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva, with a ring that’s a whopping 27 kilometers around. Protons in the LHC reach energies of trillions of electron volts. The new tiny accelerators, with mere thousands of electron volts, won’t be creating Higgs bosons anytime soon —For example, high-energy electrons can treat skin cancer by damaging the DNA within cancer cells, killing them.
Another application could involve using the devices to create special states of light that could be useful for quantum computing. Or the accelerators might be useful for materials research, for example, for making images of thin materials with ultrahigh time resolution.
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