BERKELEY, CA -- Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken a giant step toward realizing the promise of laser wakefield acceleration, by guiding and ...

The Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory provides users with high-brightness electron and laser beams, and lots of opportunity for ...

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size. At least when it comes to particle accelerators, bigger is ...

There are many applications for particle accelerators, even outside research facilities, but for the longest time they have been large, cumbersome machines, not to mention very expensive to operate.

How it works: electrons accelerated by a laser pulse (left) are used to drive the second-stage particle accelerator (right). (Courtesy: Thomas Heinemann/Strathclyde and Alberto Martinez de la ...

Laser wakefield acceleration offers a very different path. Instead of relying on long conventional structures, it sends a powerful laser through plasma, where it creates a trailing wave. Electrons can ...

Invented by T. Tajima and J. Dawson, laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) harnesses the power of high-intensity laser pulses to drive plasma waves with acceleration gradients orders of magnitude higher ...

Particle accelerators can speed up subatomic particles almost to the speed of light. The tradeoff is that this requires miles-long tunnels, so such machines are typically enormous and very expensive ...