Welcome The Future – Particle Accelerators On A Chip
Forget large underground tunnels. The new generation of particle accelerators fits on a silicon chip. Are you excited for a phone with a particle accelerator?
This would be insane just a few years ago. Particle accelerators are supposed to be giant and powerful machines that hide in miles long underground tunnels that require tremendous amounts of energy. But now we should welcome the future when particle accelerator are getting absurdly small as engineers from the Technical University Darmstadt developed a design for a laser based electron accelerator that is so small it can be included inside of silicone chip. Such a nano-accelerator should be cheap and usable for many purposes.
We all know particle accelerators that are big and very expensive. But that will – as it seems – change soon. The goal of the AchIP (Accelerator on a Chip Internation Program) that is financed by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is to develop a miniature particle accelerator for electronic chips. The main idea is to use a laser as the source of energy and to replace the metal parts with glass or silicone. This allows to miniature the accelerator.
One of the largest problems in constructing such a miniature particle accelerator was the fact that the vacuum tunnel for the electrons has to be tiny. That means the electron beam has to be targeted very precisely. The technologies that are used by regular accelerators to focus the beam aren’t really good for miniature accelerators. So the engineers used lasers to fosuc the beam and using them they managed to fosuc the beam in to a channel only 420 nanometers in diameter.
So… what could be the uses of a miniature particle accelerator? They could find everyday use in medicine or industry. They could become a part of endoscopes. Or they could be used in the semi-conductor industry while developing advanced electronics. And maybe one day each of us will have their own accelerator in their pocket.
Sources:
- https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.214801
- https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/vorbeischauen/aktuell/news_details_216704.en.jsp
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