DocM Posted March 1, 2011 Share Posted March 1, 2011 I can just imagine Best Buy's ads for pocket proton sliders ;) IEEE Spectrum.... Engineers Unveil Particle Accelerator on a ChipZipping ions down a MEMS racetrack could lead to portable particle beams 3 February 2011?Forget for a moment about the quest to build bigger high-energy particle accelerators. Last week, at the MEMS 2011 conference, in Cancun, Mexico, researchers instead explained their efforts to create a smaller one. Their chip-size cyclotron can guide argon ions with around 1.5 kiloelectronvolts of energy down a 5-millimeter accelerating track before whipping them around a 90-degree turn. The system boosts the ions? energy by 30 electronvolts. That?s not very much energy, but unlike its larger cousins, this accelerator has no need for bulky magnets and instead uses an electric field set up between parallel electrode guide rails to accelerate and steer its particle beam. The device?s designers at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., say that with more research, similar electrostatic mini-accelerators might be used in shoebox-size scanning electron microscopes or portable particle-ray guns for cancer treatment. > Instead, Shi, funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is working to create a device that might accelerate ions to energies of hundreds of kiloelectronvolts on a chip not much bigger than a few square centimeters, and a suitcase-size device capable of accelerating ions to hundreds of megaelectronvolts, in the hopes of developing portable particle accelerators. > If a small accelerator based on this design could bestow 1 MeV of energy to ion beams, it would have a broad range of applications, says Amit Lal, who worked with Shi and leads Cornell?s SonicMEMS Laboratory. Lal?s group works to create chip-scale power sources, such as a radioisotope-based generator for powering the electronics in cyborg insects. This particle accelerator is an offshoot of that research. Lal also foresees more fantastic uses for the device. Doctors already use high-energy particle beams to kill cancer cells, he says, explaining that protons shot at living tissue give off heat as they slow down. Such radiation therapy requires devices that take up an entire room, he says, but tinier accelerators might make treatments more feasible for smaller clinics or allow more localized beams to irradiate fewer healthy cells. "Think of a scalpel with a proton beam coming out of it," he says. > Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vincent Posted March 2, 2011 Share Posted March 2, 2011 Wow, fascinating :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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