Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:
Physicists are sketching the designs of a particle accelerator that would be radically smaller and cheaper than existing facilities. The technique behind these designs, known as wakefield acceleration, has been studied since the 1970s but is now making rapid advances.
Physicists use accelerators to study particles in intense detail, and, they hope, to discover new ones. Now that scientists are thrashing out plans for the next flagship particle colliders — to follow on from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland — wakefield researchers are making their case to be involved. “Now is where the rubber meets the road,” says Spencer Gessner, a particle physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and part of the group working on a design for a wakefield accelerator.
More here.
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