The accelerators of the future will be tiny and use antimatter

Scientists have found a new method to accelerate antimatter to speeds similar to axis accelerators but 1000 times smaller. The new method will allow researchers around the world to build accelerators in academic laboratories to study the properties of the Higgs boson, matter and dark energy or even evaluate the capabilities of airplanes and computer processors

The study of the fundamentals of physics in recent years has been challenged economically and politically. New and far-reaching theories require physicists to produce increasingly powerful experiments in terms of energy, capabilities and information processing to prove their claim. If in the 19th century we were content to look through a microscope to see the tiny world, in the 20th and 21st centuries scientists use accelerators that break down the particles in nature to understand what elements they are made of and how they behave. In order for particle physics to advance, international collaborations, many government budgets and decades of effort are required. The most energetic accelerator built today is in Sarn, but the construction took several decades and the costs reached tens of billions of dollars.

It is important to say that the choice of the accelerated particle affects the result of the experiment and therefore each accelerator is built according to the research question. The Geneva Large Collider (LHC) uses protons accelerated to speeds very close to the speed of light. During the collision, a multitude of elementary particles are created and from this image we can learn about the elementary processes in nature and the basic interactions of the particles with themselves. An example of another accelerator is the accelerator at Stanford University in the United States (LCLS) which produces from the accelerator a focused laser beam from X-rays for research purposes. Another problem besides money and government support is the size - today's accelerators are very huge, kilometers in radius. The bigger they are, the more powerful they are. And yet, despite the investment in their construction, natural processes such as the impact of cosmic radiation on the atmosphere increase in intensity from any accelerator ever built.

The obvious question is whether the public is willing to continue funding the accelerators of the future? And if not, is there a cheaper technology that would allow the "commercialization" of powerful accelerators in academic laboratories?

To this the researchers from London answered precisely. The new method they proposed uses energetic laser pulses on positrons and very soon an experiment is expected to be held that will test their proposal. If this method proves itself, the technology may allow hundreds of laboratories around the world to conduct experiments with accelerated antimatter.

Antimatter is identical in its properties to "normal matter" except for the electric charge (chirality also changes but does not enter into this field in the article). For example, the electron (which is considered normal matter) has a "partner" called the positron that is completely identical to it except that it has the opposite electric charge, that is, it has a positive charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they go through the process of "inhalation", or in other words, they disappear and in their place photons (particles of light) are created. Antimatter is created in nature by radioactive processes, but its life time is very short because it very quickly collides with ordinary matter and disappears as light.

The researchers from London have shown that under isolation conditions it is possible to accelerate the positrons using a powerful laser (which exists in most research laboratories) to speeds identical to those in Saran but in such an accelerator whose size does not exceed a few centimeters. One of the researchers said: "With this innovative method, we can drastically reduce the size and increases of antimatter accelerators. Accelerators that cost hundreds of millions of dollars can now be in laboratories around the world."
"The technology in the large accelerator at Sarn or the accelerators at Stanford have not undergone significant updates since their invention in the XNUMXs. They are very expensive to run and very soon we will no longer be able to produce new physics from them. A new generation of compact, energetic and cheap accelerators that accelerate exotic particles will allow us to explore new physics and will add hundreds more laboratories to this great effort."

Although the technology is only in its infancy, Dr. Sahay, one of the authors of the article is already sure that a prototype will be in a few years. Dr. Sahay bases his claims on successful experiments done on electrons using the same method of laser pulses. If we elaborate on it a little, the method uses lasers and plasma (a fourth state of accumulation in which the gas is heated enough so that the electrons are torn from the atoms and it becomes an electrically charged gas). The plasma can create positrons and lasers accelerate them into a focused beam of antimatter. The tiny accelerator, a few centimeters long (not including a laser several meters long) accelerates tens of millions of particles with similar energy every moment just like the accelerator at Sanford.

The bombardment experiments of electrons with positrons may solve some very significant puzzles in the study of fundamental physics. For example, we could create a larger amount of Higgs bosons from the accelerator in Geneva and thus allow physicists to study in more detail the properties of this particle. Perhaps in the future such accelerators will answer a question that worries physicists a lot - does super symmetry exist? Super Symmetry claims that there is a symmetry between boson particles and fermions, meaning that this theory expects to discover another set of particles identical to the normal particles in nature but whose spin is changed by half. As an example of this, the photon in the new set of particles will be a particle with half spin and not spin 1 and will receive "fermionic" and not "bosonic" properties. Super symmetry has implications for theories in nature and may solve the hierarchy problems, the dark matter problem and other problems (which I will not go into in this article). So far these supposed particles have not been observed in any accelerator

Positron accelerators also have some practical implications. Electronic devices, planes or mechanical blades must meet production standards and be precise in their function and quality. To examine whether there are defects in the material, manufacturers use an electron beam or X-rays. In contrast, positrons are affected differently by the material and add another dimension to observation and examination of quality.

for the scientific article

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Accelerating peace
• CERN is looking for Israeli technologies for a new particle accelerator
• Prof. Higgs in response to the question of the science website: I believe that when the accelerator returns to activity there will be interesting discoveries