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Apr 5, 2020

New laser technique will allow more powerful—and smaller—particle accelerators

Posted by in category: particle physics

Accelerating electrons to such high energies in a laboratory setting, however, is challenging: typically, the more energetic the electrons, the bigger the particle . For instance, to discover the Higgs boson—the recently observed “God particle,” responsible for mass in the universe—scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland used a particle accelerator nearly 17 miles long.

But what if there was a way to scale down , producing high-energy electrons in a fraction of the distance?

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