Paving the Way: An Accelerator on a Microchip

Particle accelerators are usually large and costly, but that will soon change if researchers have their way. The Accelerator on a Chip International Program (AChIP), funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in the United States, aims to create an electron accelerator on a silicon chip. The fundamental idea is to replace accelerator structures made of metal with glass or silicon, and to use a laser instead of a microwave generator as an energy source. Due to glass's higher electric field load capacity, the acceleration rate can be increased and thus the same amount of energy can be transmitted to the particles within a shorter space, making the accelerator shorter by a factor of approximately 10 than traditional accelerators delivering the same energy.