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, whi

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...