Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have designed innovative technology that can generate both high-energy and high-brightness electron bunches in an accelerator that is a fraction of the size of current particle accelerators.

This breakthrough has the potential to shrink the size of future particle colliders and X-ray free-electron lasers that researchers use to gain insight into nature’s fundamental building blocks and processes.

In the new study, the UCLA-led team developed a novel plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA), in which electrons gain energy by “surfing” a plasma wave rather than drawing energy from the electromagnetic field inside metal structures of conventional accelerators.