World's Smallest Particle Accelerator | Hacker News Reader

World's Smallest Particle Accelerator

livescience.com

17 pointsbelter7 comments

“Magnets that accelerate particles”… the only particles that a magnetic field can accelerate are magnetic monopoles, and they are yet to be discovered.

The lhc, as well as all accelerators, use electric field to accelerate particles. Supraconcting RF cavities.

Since it’s not very practical to work with 7000 billion volts, physicists use magnets to bend particles paths so they pass several several times through the rf cavities.

Unless all charge is stationary, you'll have both electric and magnetic fields.

Moving charge generates a magnetic field, and interacts with external magnetic fields. Charged particles will accelerate while spiralling around magnetic field lines. The aurora is caused by charged particles bouncing back and forth along magnetic field lines between the pinch points at the poles.

For reference, 50 keV is a realistic beam energy for a commercial electron microscope today. The big colliders at CERN and Fermilab reach up into the TeV range.

Since the deactivation of the Tevatron, FNAL has no collider nor a TeV scale accelerator. The only collider the US has left is at BNL which operates at O(100)GeV/nucleon.

Super annoying paywalled work again, why don't they publish their preprints? Really, screw that.

Why are tax payers paying for that? This is surely publically funded work. (Edit: yes it was.)

>We acknowledge funding by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF4744 and GBMF11473), ERC Grants NearFieldAtto (616823) and AccelOnChip (884217) and BMBF projects 05K19WEB and 05K19RDE.

What is accessible:

Press release from university: https://www.laserphysics.nat.fau.eu/2023/10/18/coherent-elec...

They link to the preprint of adjacent research from stanford: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02434

I also found a talk from the first author of the Nature article, including publically accessible slide set: https://agenda.infn.it/event/35577/contributions/208828/

Email the authors, ask for a copy.

AFAIK, the EU has made open access publication of ERC-funded work mandatory. Maybe the authors haven't gotten around to put the manuscript on the arXiv yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com