Simulating tomorrow's accelerators at near the speed of light
Friday, March 18, 2011 - 08:30
in Physics & Chemistry
(PhysOrg.com) -- As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BELLA (the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), now being built by the LOASIS program at the U.S. Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). BELLA, a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator, is remarkably compact. In just one meter a single BELLA stage will accelerate an electron beam to 10 billion electron volts, a fifth the energy achieved by the two-mile long linear accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.