The Large Hadron Collider in CERN accelerates particles on a track 27 kilometers long to incredible energies. But sometimes you do not need that much energy.
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Sometimes Bigger Is Not Better
Particle accelerators can do incredible things and could find use in many fields. Especially in medicine where they could save many lives. Just if they weren't so expensive and large. For example, the Stanford Linear Accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is 3.2 kilometers long or the legendary Large Hadron Collider (LHC) uses a 27 kilometers long ring. But now scientists at Stanford decided to do something about that and shrank an accelerator onto a computer chip. Such micro-accelerators could be used – for example – in extremely precise treatments of cancer.
Accelerator-On-A-Chip
In common particle accelerators, particles flow through vacuum tubes and get accelerated to incredible speeds and energies. The Stanford Linear Accelerator accelerates particles using microwaves while the LHC uses superconductive electromagnets. Such technologies require massive equipment that is very hard to shrink to fit inside a laboratory or even inside your everyday hospital. Yet, accelerators are getting smaller in recent years.
Jelena Vuckovic and her coworkers built an accelerator that may not be as powerful as SLAC or the LHC but it does fit onto a computer fit. This required a completely new design of an accelerator. In such an accelerator electrons flow through a channel that is filled with vacuum. The channel is just 30 micrometers long and thinner than a single human hair. It doesn't use microwaves or superconductive magnets – it uses a plain old infrared laser. The laser hits the chip 100 thousand times per second and with each pulse, it sends out photons that hit the electrons and accelerates them in the right direction.
While at the moment the accelerator-on-a-chip is just a prototype that isn't fit for practical uses it shows that the technology works. For the time being it can accelerate electrons to an energy of about 0.915 keV – about a thousand times less than we need for medicinal usage or research.
Accelerators That Target Cancer
Vuckovic and her colleagues are working hard on creating a micro-accelerator that could accelerate electrons to about 1 MeV. And they took a pretty simple approach. Since they need a thousand times more energy they just increased the size of the channel by about a thousand times. But because of how small it was originally it still fits on a computer chip 2.5 centimeters long.
When it comes to the possible uses of the technology – the creators hope that it could be used in targeted cancer therapy. Theoretically, it should be possible to target such an accelerator directly on a tumor and just fire one energetic elector after another straight at it without damaging any surrounding healthy tissue. So let's wish them luck since micro-accelerators could save lives and well, they just sound really cool.
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Out of curiosity, what would be the purpose of the microaccelerstors? While they seem very interesting, there doesn't seem to be much of a point of colliding particles at fractions of the speed.
As it is written in the final paragraph - they could, for example, be used as extremely precise targeted cancer therapy.