3mm Inexpensive Chip Revolutionizes Electron Accelerators 113
AaronW writes "Scientists and engineers at the US DOE SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed an advanced accelerator technology smaller than a grain of rice. It is currently accelerating electrons at 300 million volts per meter with a goal of achieving 1 billion EV per meter. It could do in 100 feet what the SLAC linear accelerator does in two miles and could achieve a million more electron pulses per second. This could lead to more compact accelerators and X-ray devices."
More like Gamma-ray devices (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless you can somehow turn down the volume of the device, 300 Mev photons are high-power gamma rays, not x-rays. BTW unlike regular x-rays, at gamma energy levels you can actually activate matter, I.E. turn it radioactive.
Re:so we wasted a shit load of money on colliders? (Score:4, Interesting)
These new devices only accelerate electrons. For high energy physics research other particles need to be accelerated and collided, e,g, hadrons (hence the name Large Hadron Collider) It's unclear if the same tech can be used for other particles. Rubbish TFA.
Re:Or, another option (Score:5, Interesting)
Those units don't even have the same dimension, how do you propose to compare them?
1 Watt is a Joule per second. An eV is 1.6*10^-16 Joule. Now according to the theory of relativity, space and time are just different dimensions of the space time, therefore space units and time units are related. The factor is the light speed, 3*10^8 m/s, that is, a second is 3*10^8 meters, or a meter is 1/(3*10^8) seconds
Therefore 1 eV per meter is 1.6*10^-16 Joule * 3*10^8/second, or 4.8*10^-8 Joule/second. Now a Watt is 1 Joule/second, therefore 1 eV/m is 4.8*10^-8 Watt.
On the other hand, 1.21 Gigawatt are 1.21*10^9 Watt. Which is a factor of about 2.5*10^16. So still quite a way to go for time travel.
SCNR ;-)
And in order to not confuse anyone: the calculation above is of course meaningless because even though you can make the *units* the same using relativity, the *quantities* are still completely different; just like the torsional moment has the same unit as energy, but certainly is not the same as energy.