If you think of a particle accelerator, what may come to mind is something like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider : a multibillion-dollar colossus that’s dozens of miles wide and crosses international borders in the name of unlocking how the universe works. But particle accelerators take many forms. There are more than 30,000 accelerators in the world today. While some of them—including LHC—are designed to unveil the universe’s secrets, the vast majority have far more Earthly purposes.
But only in the past decade have lasers become precise and affordable enough for even experimental photonic accelerators to be practical. Making them smaller, then, brought its own series of daunting obstacles. A major stumbling block had been the fact that engineers didn’t have the sophisticated technology needed to craft a mini accelerator’s tiny parts. Take the coin-sized accelerator the researchers tried to build.