PhysOrg : New accelerator technique doubles particle energy in just one meter
The researchers—from the Department of Energy’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering—published their work in the February 15 issue of Nature.
The achievement demonstrates a technology that may drive the future of accelerator design. To reach the high energies required to answer the new set of mysteries confronting particle physics—such as dark energy and the origin of mass—the newest accelerators are immensely bigger, and consequently more expensive, than their predecessors. Very high-energy particle beams will be needed to detect the very heavy and very short-lived particles that have eluded scientists so far.
“We hope that someday these breakthroughs will make future generations of accelerators feasible and affordable,” said SLAC Deputy Director Persis Drell. “It’s wonderful to see the tremendous progress in understanding the underlying physics for fundamentally new methods of accelerating particles.”
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