Plasma field particle accelerators I was discussing about particle accelerators with my friends and it came to my mind whether it is anyway possible to make a table-top accelerator(accelerator that can fit on a table). I asked this to my professor and he mentioned something about plasma field accelerator.He said that charged particle passing through a plasma created by laser pulse can get acclerated. How can plasma accelerate charged particles? What will be the maximum energy we can achieve using such accelerator?What is the progress towards the development of such science? Will it be really a table-top accelerator?
 A: Your professor was probably talking about plasma acceleration.
To explain the details of what plasma acceleration is and how it works seems inappropriate here given the wide availablity of articles on the Internet, so let's concentrate on the question of scale.
With a linear accelerator one of the key parameters is how much energy can be transferred to the accelerating particle per unit distance. As far as I know the current most powerful linear accelerator is the SLAC accelerator and it takes 3km to accelerate electrons to 50GeV. While plasma acceleration is still at the proof of principle stage it has been proven possible to accelerate particles by about a Gev per cm. This means that the 3km SLAC accelerator could be shrunk down to a size of 50cm, which would indeed fit on the top of my table.
But there are two points that need to be made:


*

*A full scale plasma accelerator is a long way off yet. To take the proof of principle trials to a production accelerator remains a massive undertaking.

*While the beam line of a plasma accelerator may be relatively short, it will require a massive supporting infrastructure. Your table would be surrounded by several aircraft hangers worth of other hardware.
