A new type of particle accelerator could accomplish the same things as the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider in about the length of a football field.
Accelerators that use lasers instead of f high-power radio-frequency waves could be more compact while maintaining the ability to energize electrons at short distances, a Physics of Plasmas news release reported.
The new accelerator could also provide the same results at a lower cost.
Laser-plasma accelerators function by sending powerful laser beams into a cloud of unattached electrons and ions called plasma.
"The effect is like the wake of boat speeding down a lake. If the wake was big enough, a surfer could ride it," Wim Leemans, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center said in the news release. "Imagine that the plasma is the lake and the laser is the motorboat. When the laser plows through the plasma, the pressure created by its photons pushes the electrons out of the way. They wind up surfing the wake, or wakefield, created by the laser as it moves down the accelerator."
These fast-moving electrons pass by the ions, creating an electric field that is between 100 and 1,000 times larger than one created by a conventional accelerator.
It takes BELLA's laser a full second to recharge and send another pulse, but the majority of high-energy physics experiments require multiple pulses per second. This petawatt laser is the fastest in the world, it would be extremely difficult to engineer a faster one.
Researchers have suggested using multiple lasers to create an "enormous pulse," the news release reported.
"Instead of one big push, we would give it many smaller pushes at roughly the same time. It's not quite perfect, but the swing doesn't really care. It averages over all these little pushes and up it goes," Leemans said.
