InBerkeley

You’ve heard of desktop PCs, which stole the thunder from massive mainframe computers 30 years ago.  Now, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are racing to build desktop particle accelerators to rival the big ones at CERN, Stanford and elsewhere, as detailed in this Popular Science article:

The BELLA accelerator uses synchronized lasers to speed up electrons over very short distances. But whereas the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLA) is 2 miles long, BELLA fits in a single room.

Of course, large accelerators like the SLA or CERN’s famous LHC are far more powerful than BELLA, and thus able to investigate much smaller particles. However, BELLA scientists believe that they can daisy-chain together a number of lasers to create an accelerator as powerful as the big boys, in a fraction of the space.

Mark Haas General