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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Tiny but energetic: this gas cell is a key component of a compact laser wakefield accelerator developed at the University of Texas at Austin. (Courtesy: Bjorn Manuel Hegelich) A highly stable laser ...

Laser-plasma electron acceleration harnesses the intense fields generated when an ultra-short, high-intensity laser pulse interacts with a plasma. The rapid displacement of plasma electrons by the ...

If one particle accelerator alone is not enough to achieve the desired result, why not combine two accelerators? Physicists have now implemented this idea. They combined two plasma-based acceleration ...

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 ...