Electrons accelerated on the wildest roller coaster on Earth

The vacuum chamber that's the business end of this accelerator. Note graduate student placed in the backdrop for scale.

UT Austin

A lot of good science is driven by the availability of technology. The laser and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRI) have had an incredible impact on science, medicine, and Western society in general. One key stage in many of these technological developments has been a transition from something like a national facility (through an institute-level facility) to an in-house instrument that individual research groups have and use on a routine basis.

Accelerator facilities, which provide beams of high energy electrons and/or X-ray photons, are still at the national facility stage. A new accelerator technology, however, is promising to change all that. In the not-so-distant future, every science department may have ready access to high-energy electrons and X-ray lasers right in their basement.

Currently, accelerators that can provide beams of electrons in the Giga-electronVolt (GeV) range are massive devices. For instance, the electrons that power the X-ray laser at Stanford are accelerated to around 17GeV over a distance of 1 km. Not only is this simply not feasible to build at every university, but many Western countries can't even afford one of these, so the few that exist end up serving scientists from around the world.