3 ms·

Tangential, but, I remember reading about a recent technology that was supposed to allow building much smaller particle accelerators... does anyone have any ide

• adev_ 2y ago
  It is already ongoing for the medical sector where Hadron therapy [^1] requires a small particle accelerator [^2]. The problem with particle accelerator is that, due to the synchrotron radiation [^3], there is a limit of what you can do in term of power in a small circular accelerator. The energy you loose in gamma radiation is inversely proportional to the diameter of the synchrotron. If you want to explore high energy collisions and the unknown, you do want theoretically speaking a linear accelerator as long as possible. There are few project world wide: The biggest one is supposed to happen in Japan with ILC. [^4] [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Hadron-therapy-facilities-in-operation-worldwide-under-construction-and-or-in-the_fig1_324210050 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Hadron-therapy-facilitie... [2]: https://www.psi.ch/en/protontherapy/the-proton-accelerator-comet https://www.psi.ch/en/protontherapy/the-proton-accelerator-c... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation [4]: https://linearcollider.org/ https://linearcollider.org/