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Non-physicist here: Can this be used for science in the same way as LHC or are the applications totally different?

TrainedMonkey 12y ago
Not a physicist either, but here is my $0.02. LHC is a collider, while this is a particle accelerator. LHC accelerates and collides two beams of particles, while this only creates one particle beam of electrons (EDIT: LHC accelerates protons [0]). In theory if you take two of these and point them at each other you can perform a collision, but without some particle beam redirection this might not be a good idea because you would be essentially pointing two powerful lasers at each other. This is different from LHC in the fact that electrons are accelerated over distance of only 9cm, while at LHC beams take multiple revolutions around 17 mile ring, with each revolution adding some more energy to the beams, before they are collided. Due to such rapid acceleration this potentially opens new way to experiment with high energy physics. LHC also works with much higher energies overall, colliding particle beams with energies of 3500 GeV [0] compared to 4.25 GeV here. [0] http://www.hephy.at/en/physics/techniques/particle-accelerators/ http://www.hephy.at/en/physics/techniques/particle-accelerat...
FiatLuxDave 12y ago
Physicist here, typing from the room next door to a linac. For the sake of full disclosure, I work in the low energy (nuclear) regime, and I am not a qualified high energy physicist. The short answer is yes and maybe yes. The primary intention behind researching laser wakefield accelerators is to provide a way to get to higher energies, like at LHC or beyond, without the huge cost. Physicists would love to test theories at higher energies than LHC is capable of, but the budgets for building a normal accelerator of that size are prohibitive. You don't necessarily need to figure out a way to make the beam go in a circular method to do this; linacs like SLAC just collide the beam with a stationary target. An effective wakefield accelerator would save $billions. However, what this article doesn't say is what are the efficiency and luminosity of this accelerator. Just like a car is measured by more than just horsepower alone, accelerators need high efficiency (amount of power to run them, and cool them) and high luminosity (how much of your beam can be usefully put on target). I can't comment on this yet, because I'm not up on current wakefield research. If you have good efficiency and luminosity as well as acceleration gradient, it might be valuable in the medical linac field. Much of the cost of medical linacs is in controls and software, but having a smaller head makes the whole linac cheaper. You can move it around and do stuff like Cyberknife does. It may provide a cost advantage which allows a new company to compete with Varian and Elekta. But reducing the size of a 1 meter object to a 1 cm object is not as valuable as reducing a 100 km object to 1 km.

Not a physicist either, but here is my $0.02. LHC is a collider, while this is a particle accelerator. LHC accelerates and collides two beams of particles, while this only creates one particle beam of electrons (EDIT: LHC accelerates protons [0]). In theory if you take two of these and point them at each other you can perform a collision, but without some particle beam redirection this might not be a good idea because you would be essentially pointing two powerful lasers at each other. This is different from LHC in the fact that electrons are accelerated over distance of only 9cm, while at LHC beams take multiple revolutions around 17 mile ring, with each revolution adding some more energy to the beams, before they are collided. Due to such rapid acceleration this potentially opens new way to experiment with high energy physics. LHC also works with much higher energies overall, colliding particle beams with energies of 3500 GeV [0] compared to 4.25 GeV here. [0] http://www.hephy.at/en/physics/techniques/particle-accelerators/ http://www.hephy.at/en/physics/techniques/particle-accelerat...

FiatLuxDave 12y ago

Physicist here, typing from the room next door to a linac. For the sake of full disclosure, I work in the low energy (nuclear) regime, and I am not a qualified high energy physicist. The short answer is yes and maybe yes. The primary intention behind researching laser wakefield accelerators is to provide a way to get to higher energies, like at LHC or beyond, without the huge cost. Physicists would love to test theories at higher energies than LHC is capable of, but the budgets for building a normal accelerator of that size are prohibitive. You don't necessarily need to figure out a way to make the beam go in a circular method to do this; linacs like SLAC just collide the beam with a stationary target. An effective wakefield accelerator would save $billions. However, what this article doesn't say is what are the efficiency and luminosity of this accelerator. Just like a car is measured by more than just horsepower alone, accelerators need high efficiency (amount of power to run them, and cool them) and high luminosity (how much of your beam can be usefully put on target). I can't comment on this yet, because I'm not up on current wakefield research. If you have good efficiency and luminosity as well as acceleration gradient, it might be valuable in the medical linac field. Much of the cost of medical linacs is in controls and software, but having a smaller head makes the whole linac cheaper. You can move it around and do stuff like Cyberknife does. It may provide a cost advantage which allows a new company to compete with Varian and Elekta. But reducing the size of a 1 meter object to a 1 cm object is not as valuable as reducing a 100 km object to 1 km.