Particle Accelerator on a Chip

3 February 2011—Forget for a moment about the quest to build bigger high-energy particle accelerators. Last week, at the MEMS 2011 conference, in Cancun, Mexico, researchers instead explained their efforts to create a smaller one.

Their chip-size cyclotron can guide argon ions with around 1.5 kiloelectronvolts of energy down a 5-millimeter accelerating track before whipping them around a 90-degree turn. The system boosts the ions’ energy by 30 electronvolts. That’s not very much energy, but unlike its larger cousins, this accelerator has no need for bulky magnets and instead uses an electric field set up between parallel electrode guide rails to accelerate and steer its particle beam. The device’s designers at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., say that with more research, similar electrostatic mini-accelerators might be used in shoebox-size scanning electron microscopes or portable particle-ray guns for cancer treatment.

Complete article can be found here.

©IEEE