Accelerating electrons to such high energies in a laboratory setting, however, is challenging: typically, the more energetic the electrons, the bigger the particle accelerator. For instance, to discover the Higgs boson—the recently observed “God particle,” responsible for mass in the universe—scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland used a particle accelerator nearly 17 miles long.
But what if there was a way to scale down particle accelerators, producing high-energy electrons in a fraction of the distance?
Comments are closed.