Like the giant waves off Hawaii or the Atlantic coast of Portugal, the process will concentrate vast amounts of power in a specific place. So in a normal accelerator, you can only make the accelerating field so strong, and if you make it stronger, you damage the material.” Any metal, any material has a breaking point. “We can do this because we use a laser to drive the accelerator and we use plasma as a medium to accelerate in, whereas a conventional accelerator uses radio frequency and uses a metal structure, copper or niobium or something like that. “We accelerate the electrons over a distance of about 10cm to 10 Giga-electronvolts (GeV), whereas 10GeV with a conventional machine is at a few kilometres,” he says. The big difference is the “0-60”, Hegelich says – the acceleration happens over a much shorter distance. That in itself is not unusual for a particle accelerator. The laser draws a plasma wave, and the electrons can surf in that plasma wave, follow the laser, and gain energy and get accelerated to the speed of light.” And that's what happens in this plasma, only it happens in three dimensions, not just two. “You can actually surf on that wave, and you can just sort of carry yourself along behind the boat on that wave. “Just like when a boat goes over a lake, it will draw a wake,” says TAU founder Bjorn Manuel Hegelich. The waves are three-dimensional plasma waves, which will accelerate the electrons to ultra-high energies. The ‘water’ is a small 10x3cm tube filled with helium gas, which is ionised by ultra-intense lasers to create plasma. The electrons, the particles that will be accelerated in the machines instead of more conventional protons, are surfers. Catching wavesĪn unusual analogy is helpful when explaining the complex workings of the company's device, a type of X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL). Opening up the Ultraverse could have far-reaching consequences in diverse fields, including medicine, nuclear waste treatment and climate change studies – and some others that have likely not been imagined yet. Unlike today’s giant facilities – the Large Hadron Collider, for example, which stretches for 27km beneath the French-Swiss border – TAU’s plasma accelerator will be the size of two shipping containers, the company claims.īy going from “miles to metres and billions of dollars to millions”, the Texan firm aims to democratise access to particle accelerators, ending the domination of countries and governmental organisations over the few available machines and giving ‘beamtime’ to researchers at universities and companies around the world. The devices probing these minute fractions of space and time will themselves be on a much smaller scale than conventional particle accelerators. The scales involved can be difficult to visualise – the company talks in terms of angstroms (0.1 nanometre) and attoseconds (one quintillionth of a second). TAU Systems calls this mysterious world, which it aims to access with its particle accelerators, the ‘Ultraverse’. Search our library and digital resources.
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