Particle accelerator in silicon chip size.

09.01.2020

Physicists at Stanford University have built a chip-sized particle accelerator.

This miniature particle accelerator comes to a whopping 0.915 kiloelectron volts at a distance of only 30 micrometers.

At one meter, the mini accelerator is expected to reach as many as 30.5 megaelectron volts. This would be enough for 94% of the speed of light.

The accelerator works with pulsating laser beams in the infrared wave range.

If the researchers were to succeed in creating this in the UV light sprektrum, completely new worlds would open up.

Pulsating laser beams generate a strong pulse. The infrared range is the longest in the light spectrum and therefore also the easiest to accelerate particles. The UV range, on the other hand, is radioactive and of extremely short wavelengths, which would bring a much higher yield.

The application areas would be primarily in medicine, but further developments could reduce the costs enormously even for large particle accelerators.

In the future, large particle accelerators such as CERN could be accommodated in the smallest space, wheredifferent types of lasers would deliver different results.