Today’s particle accelerators are massive machines, but physicists have been working on shrinking them down to tabletop scales for years. Now the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a $US13.5 million grant to Stanford University to develop a working “accelerator on a chip” the size of a shoebox over the next five years.
The international collaboration will build on prior experiments by physicists at SLAC/Stanford and Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg. If successful, the prototype could usher in a new generation of compact particle accelerators that could fit on a laboratory bench, with potential applications in medical therapies, x-ray imaging, and even security scanner technologies.
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