Scientists Achieve Breakthrough with World's Smallest Particle Accelerators

Scientists have successfully fired up the world's smallest particle accelerator, known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator (NEA), which is the size of a small coin. The NEA consists of a microchip with a vacuum tube made up of thousands of pillars, where electrons are accelerated by mini laser beams. In a recent study, researchers from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany increased the energy of electrons by 43%. This achievement, along with a similar one by colleagues at Stanford University, paves the way for the development of particle accelerators on microchips, opening up a range of potential applications.