Unlike the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ,the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in this world, researchers at Stanford had built a particle accelerator that fits on a chip. The Large Hadron collider is shaped like a ring with a diameter of 26kms and it costs about Rs. 24,262 crore or 3.4 Billion USD. The size and the cost of these accelerators limit the advancements in the fields of science and technology.
This particle accelerator belongs to a class of machines called Tabletop accelerators that scientists are interested in for lower energy applications. The use for these tabletop accelerators i sin the fields of medicine and essentially lower energy particle research, for example <1GeV.For reference the LHC has the power to accelerate protons to 8000GeV.
This area of Tabletop accelerators have substantial results as of now with regards to particle physics research. However the current research is mostly theoretical the researchers at Stanford have made a silicon chip that can accelerate electrons.
The primary goal is to encourage various labs to take part in particle physics research so as to not depend on the data provided by the richer countries to change high-energy physics research forever.
It's essentially a chip that fires pulses of infrared light through silicon to hit electrons at just the right moment, and just the right angle, to move them forward just a bit faster than before.
To achieve this they had to change the design process of a tradition accelerator. In a traditional accelerator the structure is designed to physically arrange the microwave bursts in the right direction so as to provide maximum acceleration. The wavelength of microwave is 4 inches and comparatively infrared has the wavelength that is 1/10 th width of the human hair.
That difference explains why infrared light can accelerate electrons in such short distances compared to microwaves. But this also means that the chip’s physical features must be 100,000 times smaller than the copper structures in a traditional accelerator. This demands a new approach to engineering based on silicon integrated photonics and lithography.
They used inverse engineering to develop algorithms based on these structures. This means that they calculated how much energy they needed to pass through the chip in order for the IR laser to accelerate.
The researchers want to accelerate electrons to 94 percent of the speed of light, or 1 million electron volts (1MeV), to create a particle flow powerful enough for research or medical purposes. However all that they were able to do is 1 stage and the electron had to pass through 1000 stages to attain the desired 1MeV.
This technology can be worked into a cancer-fighting resource as well , there as possibilities that high energy particles might burn the skin. Solgaard (co-author of the paper) is working on a way to channel high-energy electrons from a chip-sized accelerator through a catheter-like vacuum tube that could be inserted below the skin, right alongside a tumor, using the particle beam to administer radiation therapy surgically.
As far as I can see this technology is still at it's infancy and has huge potential in high-energy physics labs throughout the world as research can be made more hands on than before. I'm giving a link to the paper written in Stanford below check it out if you want to know more.
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