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Agreed, he's an amazing man. He was on my Qualifying Exam committee....and I presented on dielectric laser accelerators. Apparently I didn't butcher it.

I'm glad the effort is progressing and getting recognition! It would be really cool to see a lot of microfabricated accelerators out in the wild. There are lots of applications for these things and it would unlock a lot of value for the world.

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Any startups trying to commercialize these?

Not that I know of. I was adjacent to this work about 9yrs ago but have tracked it since. The technology is still too early and too risky to work on commercializing. Amazingly though, one of the lowest energy (read easiest, but still hard. The technology is not there yet.) applications is for use as a targeted radiation source for cancer therapies. This paper[0] covers that a little bit and offers a few other applications. I recall seeing a paper that proposed different applications at different energy levels. I'll see if I can dig it up.

[0] https://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/16750/slac-pub-1...

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