![]() ![]() “For electrons, plasma wakefield acceleration achieves the two things we need from it to build the machines we would like to build: They accelerate quickly and maintain their quality,” Lindstrøm says. PWFA scientists refer to this difference as asymmetry, and the latest research explores strategies for overcoming it. Whereas electrons can be accelerated as a tightly focused particle bunch in the plasma wake, positron bunches tend to lose their compact shape and focus in the plasma environment. These collisions are also preferred in the design of next-generation discovery machines, including plasma wakefield accelerators. And it’s because electrons and positrons are a matter-antimatter pair when they collide, they annihilate one another and convert neatly into new particles and energy, leaving no leftover particle mess behind.Įlectron-positron colliders of the past produced numerous insights in particle physics, including Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of quarks, the tau lepton and the J/psi meson (co-discovered with scientists using a proton accelerator). That’s because both electrons and positrons are fundamental particles they cannot be broken down into smaller parts. The cleanest collisions for particle physics research are produced by smashing together electrons and positrons. ![]() “But if even one existed, it would be a big improvement over where we are today.” The problem with positrons “It’s unlikely that you would build tons of these machines, because they consume a lot of power,” Gessner explains. If successful, PWFA could dramatically increase the energy of a future linear collider in the same footprint, or make it possible to build a smaller collider. “We’ve already demonstrated gradients that are almost 10,000 times larger than the conventional radio-frequency cavities used in SLAC’s current linear accelerator.” “Of all known particle accelerator mechanisms, plasmas provide the most energy gained over a set distance-what’s known as accelerating gradient,” says Spencer Gessner, an accelerator physicist at CERN and formerly SLAC. “With plasma wakefield acceleration, we are trying to do something analogous to making better computer chips-the phones in our pockets can now do the same thing that football fields of computers did before,” explains PWFA researcher Carl Lindstrøm from the University of Oslo.Ī plasma wakefield accelerator could accomplish in just a few meters what it takes the copper linear accelerator at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory 2 miles to do. The technology has already been shown to significantly increase the energy gained by accelerated particles over shorter distances. To get higher-energy particle collisions that could further our understanding of nature’s fundamental building blocks, accelerators conventionally must increase in size and cost.īut plasma wakefield acceleration, also known as PWFA, could buck that trend. The current most powerful particle accelerator in the world is the Large Hadron Collider, which measures about 17 miles in circumference and cost more than $4 billion to construct. Three recent studies have advanced accelerator physicists’ efforts to design a powerful future matter-antimatter collider using plasma wakefield technology. That’s the basic idea behind a powerful technology under development called plasma wakefield acceleration, which promises to make future particle colliders more compact and affordable. ![]() If you send two bunches of particles speeding through plasma about a hair’s width apart, the first creates a wake that feeds the second with energy. A plasma is an ionized gas, a gas with enough energy that some of its atoms have lost their electrons, and those negatively charged electrons are floating along with the now positively charged nuclei they left behind. Matter is known to exist in four different states: solid, liquid, gas or-under circumstances such as very high temperatures-plasma. ![]()
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