Alex Bogacz, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility since 1997, has spent his career in accelerator physics solving problems. From ...

In 2012, particle accelerators hit the headlines when researchers at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. This breakthrough discovery resulted from decades of research and experimentation ...

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, consists of a gas in which electrons are no longer bound to atoms, which allows ...

Whenever SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's linear accelerator is on, packs of around a billion electrons each travel together at nearly the speed of light through metal piping. These electron ...

I don't know about you, but ever since I started covering the Large Hadron Collider and other large-scale particle accelerators for ExtremeTech, I've always morbidly wondered: What would happen if a ...

A beam of electrons crossed just a few millimeters of plasma, then helped trigger an effect that usually belongs to massive research sites. In this case, the light produced fell in the extreme ...

Laser physicists have built a novel hybrid plasma accelerator. Particle accelerators have become an indispensable tool for studies of the structure of matter at sub-atomic scales, and have important ...

Just a few hundred feet from where we are sitting is a large metal chamber devoid of air and draped with the wires needed to control the instruments inside. A beam of particles passes through the ...

Some of the most fundamental questions about our universe are also the most difficult to answer. Questions like what gives matter its mass, what is the invisible 96 percent of the universe made of, ...

Scientists have successfully developed a pocket-sized particle accelerator capable of projecting ultra-short electron beams with laser light at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. To achieve this ...

When students on campus think of a particle accelerator, a machine that launches atomic particles at incredibly high speeds into one another, they might think of Barry Allen’s origin story in The CW ...