Berkeley Lab Builds World Record Tabletop-Size Particle Accelerator 90
Zothecula writes Taking careful aim with a quadrillion watt laser, researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab claim to have managed to speed up subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded for a compact accelerator. By blasting plasma in their tabletop-size laser-plasma accelerator, the scientists assert that they have produced acceleration energy of around of 4.25 giga-electron volts. Acceleration of this magnitude over the short distances involved correlates to an energy rise 1,000 times greater than that of a traditional – and very much larger – particle accelerator.
Good/BAd news for science. (Score:2)
The good a smaller more affordable technology will allow greater numbers of people to do such research.
The bad news, it may be hard to get grants for large projects like the LHC where a full science based economy is built around a device.
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The bad news, it may be hard to get grants for large projects like the LHC where a full science based economy is built around a device.
Perhaps we should be basing it around the design and production of smaller, less resource-intensive devices instead anyway, when such a thing is possible.
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There are many good applications for a device generating energies in the 4Gev range, but for things like finding Higgs, it's not even close. Some things just have to have full power. Many other things surrounding it are there because they can benefit from the essentially free excess of particles.
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What we're seeing here is a potential paradigm shift. Saying that there'll be no budget for expensive projects compared to this one is like saying now that the GM EV1 two-seater is out, there'll be no interest in V8-powered luxury cars. In reality, we're seeing paradigm shifts in that market where companies a
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A full science based economy ? Built around a device ?
If that is the aim just build big cathedrals pop in a saint's reliquary and call it a day.
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Well we have issues with funding science.
1. If the science isn't directly affecting a marketable product, it is hard to get funding from corporations.
2. Universities need to make their money by teaching bratty undergrads, and most of the research has to teach them.
3. Governments only like to give money if there is something in it that will get them elected.
The LHC is big enough to positively affect a local economy, and the research is popular enough to get "I AM PRO-SCIENCE" creds.
The sad thing is that to d
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We could just make it easier to get the research and experimentation tax credit.
Just to put things on the table, I am pro science but I am anti lazy science. The LHC is by any standard lazy science, in that the thought progress for 60 years leading up to it, was build it BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER. It was pretty clear as far back as the SSC proposals there were other routes to go, ring type accelerators just have been a conceptually lazy approach. Also they tended to funny money and prestige into the mini indust
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It almost sounds like someone claiming we should have stopped making magnetic hard drives years ago, because their cheapness and large capacity have been holding SSD back. Regardless of the likelihood that SSDs will eventually replacing spinning disks in the future, they still have been and will continue for some time to be outclassed in certain use cases.
LOL scratch a big scientist and find someone who believes in a command economy. The difference between the LHC and Hard drives is that people buy hard drives of their own free will. The money for the LHC is extracted at the threat of imprisonment.
And just an FYI plasma accelerators go back to the 80s, when it was already clear the SSC had reached ridiculousness.
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You think you've stepped on the toes of some particle physicist that is upset at a dying empire,
No I am pretty sure I have stepped on the toes of someone who is happy with the status quo of how government funds academic science, and probably aspires to have the spot occupied by a dieing generation.
So you actually have no counter point to any of the issues pointed out with your original statement?
What issues have you raised ? You have blathered on about plasma accelerators getting funding 20 years late.
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Unh hunh. Where do I start
LHC cost vs Accelerator spending in the U.S. nice change up there. Why don't you argue botswana's particle physics budget as the opposition ?
And while you are at it why don't you mention just how much of the U.S. laser budget is military based, rendering the pure science aspects a freebie ?
Considering these things as is have industrial applications and now have commercial R&D interest with a lot of components being off the shelf, the funding isn't too late, but was too much too early.
Name a few, there's virtually none. The last time I saw someone make this claim it was a colleague working at RHIC trying to tie his work to P.E.T. scans, and he knew it was B.S. and I knew it wa
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Well I would be completely taken aback, If I knew nothing about the field.
Lets go one by one
Ion implantation, This goes back to the 1950s you want to tell me how it's a spin off from the LHC ?
Synchrotron Light Sources : At least back to the 70s and btw you forgot to mention it's cousin the Free Electron laser
Radiotherapy: Goes back to the early 1900s
Radio Isotope generation for medicine: Goes back to the original cyclotrons, want to tell me how this is a spinoff from giant accelerators ?
Your list may in no
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Oh and I forgot to mention it. But most radionuclides for medicine are made in reactors not with accelerators. Though I would be willing to bet there are people trying to adapt a Farnsworth Fusor to the production.
But please keep on posting factual inaccuracies, it leaves little doubt why you are posting anonymously.
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"The last time I saw someone make this claim it was a colleague working at RHIC trying to tie his work to P.E.T. scans, and he knew it was B.S. and I knew it was B.S."
So not only are you stupid cry baby, you're stupid cry baby trying to blame it on having stupid friends...
Well good to see where you were coming from all along.
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Thanks for letting me know what I was advocating and then showing where what you said I said was wrong.
I am sure there's a word for that kind of thing.
Anyway if you can let me know how citing applications of technologies developed long before the LHC was a dream of anyone's eye is relevant to its funding ?
Otherwise I expect you will come back with something about how basic physics lets us design buildings so that's why we should fund things like the LHC.
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Really I don't know how it would be possible to more completely miss a point. It's not about particular tech it's about the process of funding. You fund fund Brodibingian versions of things you have already done, it means you aren't funding other approaches. You want another good example ? Take the human genome project, Ventner's shotgun technique blew away the existing techniques.
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The bad news, it may be hard to get grants for large projects like the LHC where a full science based economy is built around a device.
In contrast, I see that as more good news. The LHC is obsolete. The "science based economy" of the area will try every lame excuse to keep people throwing money at it. Strong odds that if it is not abandoned, it ends up as some museum to the history of particle science.
I highly doubt that will happen. Investing that kind of money into a solution does not pair up with our disposable society of computing.
The computers sitting on Mars right now were obsolete long before we sent it into the void of space. That pretty much goes for all of our comms floating around in space right now, and yet we still rely on those obsolete devices every single day.
Old does not always translate into worthless no matter how much of an Apple fanboi you are.
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The Tetravon [wikipedia.org] wasn't exactly peanuts and it's been shut down.
It was in operation for almost 30 years.
Operational longevity like that isn't peanuts either.
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The Tetravon [wikipedia.org] wasn't exactly peanuts and it's been shut down.
It was in operation for almost 30 years.
Operational longevity like that isn't peanuts either.
And upgraded several times through that 30 years, including some work less than 2 years before it was shut down.
I'm not saying that "The LHC should be shut down", but claiming that "The LHC won't get shut down because it was expensive" is, in my opinion, a misnomer.
I'll point back to your original statement: "Old does not always translate into worthless", but apparently my understanding of your statement is "at some point, it does".
Re:Only good news for science. (Score:2)
Indeed low cost means more affordable devices for more labs, and new technology means possible expansion to bigger (then more exensive) such devices, allowing to explore new frontiers in physics.
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"... two opposing particle beams of either protons at up to 4 teraelectronvolts (4 TeV or 0.64 microjoules), or lead nuclei at an energy of 574 TeV (92.0 J) per nucleus (2.76 TeV per nucleon),[4][5] with energies to be roughly doubled to around 7 TeV (14 TeV collision energy) —more than seven times any predecessor collider—by around 2015."
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Yawn (Score:2)
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No, that was a "prismatic accelerator." It... accelerated.... prisms?
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Next step: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Beowulf cluster... (Score:2)
Seriously though, how far can this scale up? What if just plug one of these into the LHC?
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Neglecting the fact that this accelerates electrons, while the LHC works with protons...
And assuming the energy adds linearly...
The resultant particle beam would be all of 0.0607% more powerful.
There's a reason the LHC is huge, it's accelerating protons to about 7TeV, or 0.999999991c, just 3m/s slower than light speed. That's not to say that these little linear accelerators don't have their use, there's no doubt lots of low-energy physics experiments that can be performed with electrons at a paltry 4.25GeV
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That's what she said ... ;-)
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Don't cross the beams! Or think about marshmallows.
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Ghostbusters proton weapon
Well, I guess so.
At least we already know what happens when you cross the streams.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Duh! (Score:2)
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It would be much more instructive to learn the laser's energy delivery in Joules than its power in PW for some unspecified but infinitesimal duration.
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Not really, both numbers are incredibly important: and they provided both. It only takes an instant to do it's job, and in that instant the power levels are highly important if you want to understand the physics. And they do tell you the energy delivered on a per-electron basis - the most important number, joules are just far to large to be relevant to particle physics: 4.25GeV = 6.8092504 × 10^-10 joules
Even the LHC doesn't get into the joule range: 7TeV = 1.1215236 × 10^-6 joules
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The important number they seem to have left out is the luminosity.
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42.2 Joules, actually.
But since that energy was delivered in 40 femtoseconds, they multiplied the two values and said it is a petawatt laser.
Funny what a wikipedia search [wikipedia.org] might teach you :)
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No, it's not just you.
Most human brains really can't figure out WTF this means. Even the people who work in this stuff occasionally remember what they're saying and think "damn".
My first thought was "is quadrillion a real number?", followed by thinking ... million, billion, trillion, quadrillion.
Million = 1,000,000
Billion = 1,000,000,000
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
Quadrillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000
And, yes, at that point it
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quadrillion = 1E15.
That makes it easier.
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You know, it's easier to say, and it's shorter to write.
But when I'm trying to wrap my head around what it's actually saying ... I prefer to see the huge list of zeroes.
And then my brain sort of wobbles around and does the Keanu Reeves "woah".
Some of these numbers are just so intractable to the human brain you need a visual reference.
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You know, as acclimated as I am to American-style large numbers, I can't help thinking the British may be on to something with their definition of billion = bi-million = 1,000,000 x 1,000,000, or what we would call a trillion.
By that logic I would extrapolate that in Britain the terms would mean
Billion = 1,000,000^2 = 1,000,000,000,000
Trillion = 1,000,000^3 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
Quadrillion = 1,000,000^4 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
etc.
Doesn't line up with SI units as nicely, but is much better
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It lines up perfectly:
Million = 1,000,000 = Mega
Milliard = 1,000,000,000 = Giga
Billion = 1,000,000,000,000 = Tera
Billiard = 1,000,000,000,000,000 = Peta
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = Exa
Trilliard = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = Zetta
Quadrillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = Yotta
Quadrilliard = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Etc
electrons (Score:4, Interesting)
there has been much research in reducing the size of accelerators since ... forever. These guys are probably only reallly useful for e+/- collisions so it is highly stupid to compare it the LHC or even Tevatron - the appropriate comparison is something like SLC at SLAC. Where these will really find most use (if they can make the laser side practical) is in medicine.
The LEP only went to 104,5 GeV (Score:2)
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Luminosity is a problem. The amount of data you get about a particular energy (like 125 GeV) is a function of both the collision energy and the rate of those collisions.
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Yes, there is more to an accelerator than energy. There's luminosity, beam current, and oodles of other parameters about bunching, etc. all of which affect the data rate and signal to noise ratio when conducting frontier science experiments such as what the LHC does. So the LHC and giant accelerators won't be going away any time soon.
But small accelerator tech. that can put modest energies at modest luminosities into the hands of researchers with $50-250k budgets and small lab spaces would be a great imp
What about efficiency? (Score:2)
Anyone know what the efficiencies are on these sorts of "tabletop" laser particle accelerators versus say a linac? I'm curious as to whether it'd make an effective "tabletop" spallation neutron source - protons in the range of a couple hundred MEv to a few GEv are ideal for that purpose. (yes, I know this one is an electron accelerator, but ultrashort laser pulses can also accelerate protons [physicsworld.com], although I don't know if you can hit the same sorts of energies).
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Anyone know what the efficiencies are on these sorts of "tabletop" laser particle accelerators versus say a linac? I'm curious as to whether it'd make an effective "tabletop" spallation neutron source
I don't know about efficiency, but the problem with the tabletop synchrotrons (which accelerate electrons, but X-rays are the primary product) is that their X-ray flux is much lower than the football-field-sized rings, which means they're not as useful for molecular imaging applications. My guess would be that
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Superconducting linacs can be quite efficient - 10s of %. Electric costs are not a major driver for most accelerators so typically they are not that good in order to save construction costs. You could probably design >50% wall plug -> beam efficiency accelerator if you wanted to.
Laser accelerators are not that good at converting laser energy to beam energy. I don't know the numbers, but above ~10% would surprise me. Then the high drive lasers are very inefficient (these are not diode laesrs!). Both
300,000 gigawatts? (Score:1)
Though, in this initial experiment, it was limited to pulses of a "mere" 0.3 PW or 300,000 gigawatts.
Does this mean they can travel through time approximately 250,000 times faster than Doc Brown could? Or is the conversion from gigawatts to jiggawatts nonlinear?
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Nerd Card Status: REVOKED.
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Said every science geek on the planet the first time they watch Back to the Future.
I believe it's the bastard offspring of a gigawatt and a movie studio that had no use for even a cut-rate science advisor for its marginally science fiction movie.
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Pronouncing gigawatt like jiggawatt is perfectly valid. I've never looked at a Back to the Future script so I don't know if they spelled it correctly or not.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
The jigga pronunciation was apparently popular in the US in the 80s (when Back to the Future was made), and was made a standard by NIST. It's since swung overwhelmingly towards the hard g.
It looks like you're right though, the pronunciation in the movie, despite being correct, WAS the result of scriptwriters who had no idea what it was:
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.co... [nytimes.com]
Tabletop converter, not accelerator (Score:2, Informative)
The thing on the table top takes a laser pulse and uses the energy to accelerate particles to high speed.
The laser is BELLA it takes a building
http://www.lbl.gov/community/bella/
Still, it's much better that a multi km ring.
Both size and energy.
I can't wait for the ... (Score:2)
... advertiser-supported [sciconnect.com] app for this.
Tabletop? (Score:2)
Tables come in all sorts of sizes, from card tables through ones used for a state banquet.
I want to hear more about (Score:2)
the "smallest miscalculation could lead to disaster". What sort of disaster are we talking about here? Will it tear a hole in the space time continuum and result in an ever expanding vacuum bubble that will engulf the known universe?
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Well, just about anything could do that. Clapping my hands has an infinitesimally small chance of doing that.
This has a slightly larger chance.
{Admiral Ackbar voice} (Score:2)