Physicists just built the world’s smallest particle accelerator! The whole thing can fit on a DIME. Here’s how this works and why it matters…
You might’ve heard of a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider.
It’s a 17 mile (27km) underground tunnel where particles speed up to nearly the speed of light, and then smashed together! This tiny new particle accelerator created by researchers at FAU is 54 million times smaller than that. Instead of a big loop, it shoots electrons into a channel of hundreds of tiny silicon pillars, each just 2 micrometers tall. (For reference, FIFTY micrometers is the diameter of a human hair!)
The goal with the Large Hadron Collider is to study particle collisions. But the goal with this tiny particle accelerator is to one day make it into highly-targeted way of killing cancer cells. You could imagine sticking this tiny accelerator on the end of a scope into the patient’s body, exactly where you’d want to treat with precise radiation. Right now though, this accelerator is too weak, they’d need to make it a lot more powerful. But for now, this is an exciting proof-of-concept. And it’s just plain wild to me that we can accelerate particles at all – in a massive tunnel or the size of a dime.
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