Researchers build a particle accelerator that fits on a chip

Science Daily  January 2, 2020 The size and cost of conventional radio-frequency accelerators limit the utility and reach of this technology. Dielectric laser accelerators (DLAs) provide a compact and cost-effective solution to this problem by driving accelerator nanostructures with visible or near-infrared pulsed lasers, resulting in a 104 reduction of scale. A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) present an experimental demonstration of a waveguide-integrated DLA that was designed using a photonic inverse-design approach. By comparing the measured electron energy spectra with particle-tracking simulations, they inferred a maximum energy gain of 0.915 kilo–electron volts […]