Question: if you build a compact particle accelerator how will that help us?

Ceri Brenner answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hi Minah,

sorry for the delay in my response. compact particle accelerators can be used by anyone who needs a source of charged particles. i know that doesn’t make it any clearer, so here are a couple of examples:

– proton beam cancer treatment (known as hadron therapy, or ion beam oncology). radiobiologists (people who study and treat cancer tumours) have said that using a beam of protons, as opposed to a gamma ray beam, is way more effective at damaging the cancer cells whilst reducing the radiation exposure of the healthy tissue around the tumour (sounds pretty good to me). now, the only problem they face at the moment, is that conventional particle accelerators (you need a reasonably hefty sized machine to reach cancer treatment proton energies) are large, require a lot of shielding material and most importantly really expensive to build. We hope that by designing a laser plasma accelerator, we can shrink the accelerator down and so therefore reduce the capital cost, shielding requirement and overall size so that perhaps they become affordable methods in which to provide a proton beam for cancer treatment and more proton beam cancer treatment centres will be built (hoorah).

-this again comes down to cost and flexibility. Charged particle beams can be used directly to super heat material so that physicists can study what happens as a material changes state. They can also be used in industry to etch really really small shapes and letters into material. Another product of laser plasma accelerators is very short bursts of high energy x-rays and gamma rays. These can be used for imaging through layers of material and because the source is pulsed, we can collect images over time and see how the material changes. There’s even talk of using laser produced x-rays for security applications (looking through cargo for example without even having to open up the container). All these wonderful applications require a compact and flexible source though, and that’s where laser plasma accelerators win over conventional systems.

We’ve got a way to go until these apps are realised but i’m optimistic that it will be sooner than you think 🙂