TO GET to the very bottom of physics, there has always been one rule: size matters. The first particle smashers of the early 1960s were little wider than a dining room table. A decade later, the Tevatron, a circular collider in the US, had a circumference of 6 kilometres. Today’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has one four times as long. Now there are plans to build colliders 100 kilometres in circumference: about the size of New York City.
Physicists get a lot of flak for these enormous – and enormously expensive – aspirations. Nature is tenacious, however, and wresting its most closely held subatomic secrets from it has always meant accelerating particles over longer and longer distances before smashing them together. But a new shortcut is emerging in a weird, cloud-like state of matter known as a plasma. Inject particles into this febrile stuff, and they can accelerate a thousand times faster than before.
This is more than wishful thinking. Plasma accelerators have been advancing steadily over the past few decades, and while they have yet to pose a serious threat to the dominance of conventional facilities, that might be changing. Several recent developments suggest that plasma accelerators could soon give big beasts like the LHC a run for their money. Ultimately, the hope is that these small machines will let us tackle some of the biggest questions in physics: why our universe is filled with matter and not antimatter, for instance, or what constitutes dark matter. It seems the ironclad rule of particle physics is about to be broken.
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