Physicists Break World Record for Compact Particle Accelerator with Powerful Laser

Soon, researchers may be dealing with a compact accelerator. Using one of the most powerful lasers in the world, physicists have accelerated subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded from a compact accelerator.

In this case, the researchers used a specialized petawatt laser and a charged-particle gas called plasma. This allowed them to get the particles up to speed in the laser-plasma accelerator. This particular emerging class of particle accelerators could shrink traditional, miles-long accelerators to machines that can fit on a table.

The particles-electrons, in this case-were sped up within a nine-centimeter long tube of plasma. The researchers managed to speed up the particles to a corresponding energy of 4.25 giga-electron volts. The acceleration over such a short distance actually corresponded to an energy gradient 1,000 times greater than traditional particle accelerators and was a world record energy for laser-plasma accelerators.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is a more traditional particle accelerator, is 17 miles in circumference and speeds up particles by modulating electric fields inside a metal cavity. Laser-plasma accelerators, in contrast, rely on a pulse of laser light that's injected into a short and thin straw-like tube that contains plasma. The laser creates a channel through the plasma as well as waves that trap free electrons and accelerate them to high energies. In the case of this latest experiment, the researchers employed BELLA (Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), which is one of the most powerful lasers in the world.

"We're forcing this laser beam into a 500 micron hole about 14 meters away," said Wim Leemans, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The BELLA laser beam has sufficiently high pointing stability to allow us to use it. With a lot of lasers, this never could have happened."

The findings could be huge in terms of creating accelerators that are far more compact that current ones. This, in turn, could further future research.

The findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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