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Particle accelerator built with help of Iranian scientist

Iranian scientist Arya Fallahi (seen in the bottom right corner) helps develop a miniature particle accelerator seen in the picture (Photo by Getty Images)

An Iranian scientist has been part of a major research work which has resulted in the production of a very small-sized particle accelerator.

Arya Fallahi was on an interdisciplinary team of researchers  that built the first prototype of a miniature particle accelerator which uses terahertz radiation instead of radio frequency structures.

A single accelerator module is no more than 1.5 centimeters long and one millimeter thick. The terahertz technology holds the promise of miniaturising the entire set-up by at least a factor of 100.

The prototype was set up in Kärtner's lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, and the researchers are presenting their prototype in the journal Nature Communications.

The authors see numerous applications for terahertz accelerators, in materials science, medicine and particle physics, as well as in building X-ray lasers.

The scientists are from the German institute, the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL).

For their prototype, the scientists used a special microstructured accelerator module, specifically tailored to be used with terahertz radiation. The physicists fired fast electrons into the miniature accelerator module using a type of electron gun. The electrons were then further accelerated by the terahertz radiation fed into the module. This first prototype of a terahertz accelerator was able to increase the energy of the particles by seven kiloelectronvolts (keV).

“This is not a particularly large acceleration, but the experiment demonstrates that the principle does work in practice,” explains Fallahi, who did the theoretical calculations.

“The theory indicates that we should be able to achieve an accelerating gradient of up to one gigavolt per meter.”

This is more than 10 times what can be achieved with the best conventional accelerator modules available today.


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