POCKET-SIZE PARTICLE ACCELERATORS

Post date: 13-Mar-2011 03:06:29

The Large Hadron Collider, which is in a 27-kilometer-long underground circular tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland, can accelerate subatomic particles to energies

in the trillions of electronvolts. But separate teams of researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the University of California at Los Angeles have figured

out how to fit a particle accelerator on a chip. The MEMS particle accelerators don't impart nearly as much energy on ions as the Hadron Collider, but a million eV

will likely be enough to make such devices as a cancer-killing particle-beam machine that's the size of a shoebox.

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