The CERN particle accelerator that will breathe new life into physics

A caller breed of collider, called plasma wakefield accelerators, tin survey cardinal physics successful caller ways by doing thing the Large Hadron Collider cannot do: colliding electrons

Physics 21 February 2023

By Joshua Howgego

The results of proton collisions absorbed by screens astatine the LHC

Fichet, Jacques Herve/CERN

TO GET to Edda Gschwendtner’s experiment, you participate a small, brutalist gathering astatine CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory connected the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. You caput into the assistance and descend 50 metres into a immense underground chamber. After a bid of yellowish information doors, you indispensable traverse a kilometre on a downward-sloping passageway – which is wherefore Gschwendtner typically uses 1 of the tiny achromatic bikes parked wrong the doors.

She is processing a promising benignant of particle accelerator that mightiness assistance america find caller physics. Since the find of the Higgs boson successful 2012, particle physics hasn’t made overmuch advancement to talk of. So, thoughts are turning to machines that tin assistance america probe world successful antithetic ways.

The experimentation Gschwendtner works on, called AWAKE, creates a question of plasma – a state of charged particles – and sends electrons surfing on it. While astir colliders are getting bigger and pricier, this underground instrumentality and its ilk, known arsenic plasma wakefield accelerators, are compact. Don’t beryllium fooled by their size, though – they battalion a punch. Compared with the likes of CERN’s immense Large Hadron Collider (LHC), implicit a acceptable distance, plasma wakefield exertion tin negociate overmuch stronger accelerations. “Up to a origin of 1000 more,” says Gschwendtner.

It is proving effective. Over the past fewer years, AWAKE has had a drawstring of successes successful accelerating electrons implicit a region of conscionable metres. Last year, it passed a important test, and researchers are present gearing up to instrumentality it to higher energies. …