$13.5M Moore Grant to Develop Working ‘Accelerator on a Chip’ Prototype “The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded…
$13.5M Moore Grant to Develop Working ‘Accelerator on a Chip’ Prototype
“The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $13.5 million to Stanford University for an international effort, including key contributions from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, to build a working particle accelerator the size of a shoebox based on an innovative technology known as “accelerator on a chip.”
This novel technique, which uses laser light to propel electrons through a series of artfully crafted chips, has the potential to revolutionize science, medicine and other fields by dramatically shrinking the size and cost of particle accelerators.
“Can we do for particle accelerators what the microchip industry did for computers?” said SLAC physicist Joel England, an investigator with the 5-year project. “Making them much smaller and cheaper would democratize accelerators, potentially making them available to millions of people. We can’t even imagine the creative applications they would find for this technology.”
Robert L. Byer, a Stanford professor of applied physics and co-principal investigator for the project who has been working on the idea for 40 years, said, “Based on our proposed revolutionary design, this prototype could set the stage for a new generation of ‘tabletop’ accelerators, with unanticipated discoveries in biology and materials science and potential applications in security scanning, medical therapy and X-ray imaging.””