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

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.