Accelerators are huge, expensive tubes sometimes miles long that produce high energies for smashing protons or making intense X-ray light. 21st-century technology has taken us from the room-sized ENIAC to microprocessors that fit in your pocket. Can the same be done for particle accelerators? Fiber optics or silicon crystals could be used to build particle pathways, with high-power lasers as the driver. In this lecture, Christopher McGuinness shows how scientists are using nanotech fabrication techniques at SLAC to build an accelerator on a chip.
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