The US department of Energy researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab broke scientific world record by using the most powerful lasers on Earth to accelerate electrons through a 9cm tube of plasma.
The research team used a compact particle accelerator, a small, inches-long device to accelerate subatomic particles to the highest energies.
The speed reached produced an energy gradient, which was 1,000 times larger than that achieved in larger, traditional particle accelerators, although over a much smaller distance.
The device is known as a laser-plasma accelerator or Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), which has the potential to make massive, traditional particle accelerators old-fashioned. BELLA produces quadrillion watts of power (a petawatt).
While traditional accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHD) at CERN use electric fields to accelerate the particles, the laser-plasma accelerator instead shoots a laser through plasma. This creates waves which then push the particles to such extraordinary speeds.
With further development, the Berkeley Lab researchers believe they can shrink traditional, miles-long accelerators to machines that can fit on a table.
Study's lead author Dr. Wim Leemans, Director of Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division at Berkeley Lab, said, "We're forcing this laser beam into a 500 micron hole about 14 meters away, the BELLA laser beam has sufficiently high pointing stability to allow us to use it. With a lot of lasers, this never could have happened".
The researchers sped up the electrons inside a nine-centimeter 4-inch-long tube of plasma to energy of 4.25 giga-electron volts. The researchers hope to more than double the energy produced, with a near-term goal being to reach 10 giga-electron volts. The team's paper has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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