A new dawn for particle accelerators in the wake

During a lecture in 2012, G. Rajasekaran, professor emeritus at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, said that the future of high-energy physics lay with engineers being able to design smaller particle accelerators. The theories of particle physics have for long been exploring energy levels that we might never be able to reach with accelerators built on Earth. At the same time, it will still be on physicists to reach the energies that we can reach but in ways that are cheaper, more efficient, and smaller – because reach them we will have to if our theories must be tested. According to Rajasekaran, the answer is, or will soon be, the tabletop particle accelerator.

In the last decade, tabletop accelerators have inched closer to commercial viability because of a method called plasma wakefield acceleration. Recently, a peer-reviewed experiment detailing the effects of this method was performed at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the results published in the journal Physical Review Letters. A team-member said in a statement: "We have accelerated high-charge electron beams to more than 10 million electron volts using only millijoules of laser pulse energy. This is the energy consumed by a typical household lightbulb in one-thousandth of a second." Ten MeV pales in comparison to what the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), achieves – a dozen million MeV – but what the UMD researchers have built doesn't intend to compete against the LHC but against the room-sized accelerators typically used for medical imaging.