[HN Gopher] Particle accelerators for the microchip era
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Particle accelerators for the microchip era
Author : sharpshadow
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-06-04 19:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.moore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.moore.org)
| PeterCorless wrote:
| I've known Dr. Byer for years and years. A great guy. So glad
| that he and his team at Stanford are getting due recognition for
| this work.
| thenobsta wrote:
| Agreed, he's an amazing man. He was on my Qualifying Exam
| committee....and I presented on dielectric laser accelerators.
| Apparently I didn't butcher it.
|
| I'm glad the effort is progressing and getting recognition! It
| would be really cool to see a lot of microfabricated
| accelerators out in the wild. There are lots of applications
| for these things and it would unlock a lot of value for the
| world.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Any startups trying to commercialize these?
| thenobsta wrote:
| Not that I know of. I was adjacent to this work about 9yrs
| ago but have tracked it since. The technology is still too
| early and too risky to work on commercializing. Amazingly
| though, one of the lowest energy (read easiest, but still
| hard. The technology is not there yet.) applications is for
| use as a targeted radiation source for cancer therapies.
| This paper[0] covers that a little bit and offers a few
| other applications. I recall seeing a paper that proposed
| different applications at different energy levels. I'll see
| if I can dig it up.
|
| [0] https://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/16750/slac-
| pub-1...
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| The continued shrinking of accelerators has had me brainstorming
| on a compact nanofusion approach for awhile
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B5maRx9w0ahQTqSe6UZ56rd0...
| ben_w wrote:
| You might want to also look at what can already be done with an
| electrostatic design such as a fusor, and why they _aren 't_
| widespread outside of science fair projects.
|
| Another limitation with anything micro-fabricated is that the
| resulting radiation from fusion working is going to knock atoms
| out of their lattices, degrading chips in direct proportion to
| total (lifetime) energy output.
| ooterness wrote:
| No information on what kind of energy levels these can achieve?
| i.e., keV or MeV?
| PeterCorless wrote:
| "Using a more sophisticated silicon structure, still for
| subrelativistic electrons (96.3 keV), the highest gradient
| achieved is 370 MV/m over a 5.4 mm interaction length in the
| dual pillar silicon structure with two-sided illumination"
|
| -- Source:
| https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-30-1-505&id=46...
| baq wrote:
| I heard about photon rockets, I heard about ion drives, but
| an electron rocket motor is new. Can't be bothered to do the
| math here but Isp doesn't sound too bad eyeballing it...? 1
| eV is 5.94 x 10^6 m/s but multiplying this by 96.3k looks
| like it needs a relativistic correction.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| "These on-chip devices accelerate sub-relativistic electrons of
| initial energy 83.4 keV by 1.21 keV over 30 mm, providing peak
| acceleration gradients of 40.3 MeV/m." (Sapra et al. Science
| 2020)
|
| Lasers on a chip plus photonic waveguide technology, oh my!
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.12822
|
| [edit this is an earlier version see other comment]
| pfdietz wrote:
| A problem with all these advanced acceleration techniques is beam
| quality. I'd worry imperfections in the microfabricated device
| would cause this to degrade. Imperfections become increasingly
| important as the device is miniaturized; in a 1 micron device, an
| offset of a single atom's width is .01%.
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