A new class of colliders, called plasma wakefield accelerators, can study fundamental physics in a new way, by electron collisions, which the Large Hadron Collider cannot do.
Physics
February 21, 2023
Results of proton collisions absorbed by the screen at the LHC Fishet, Jacques Herbe/CERN
To get to Edda Gschwendtner’s experiments, you enter the small ghoulish building of CERN, a European particle physics laboratory outside of Geneva, Switzerland. Enter the elevator and go down 50 meters to the vast basement. After going through a series of yellow security her doors, along a downhill tunnel she must travel 1 km. This is why Gschwendtner usually uses one of her little white bikes parked inside the door.
She is developing a promising class of particle accelerators that will help discover new physics. Particle physics hasn’t made much progress since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. That’s why there’s been a lot of interest in machines that help us explore reality in a variety of ways.
Gschwendtner is working on an experiment called AWAKE that creates a wave of plasma, a gas of charged particles, and sends electrons surfing along it. Most colliders are getting bigger and more expensive, but this underground machine and its cousins, known as plasma wakefield accelerators, are compact. But don’t let its size fool you. Packed with punch. Compared to something like CERN’s gigantic Large Hadron Collider (LHC), plasma wakefield technology can manage much stronger accelerations over a given distance. “Up to 1000 times more he does,” he says Gschwendtner.
It’s working. Over the last few years, AWAKE has had a series of successes in accelerating electrons at distances of just a few meters. Last year it passed an important test and researchers are now gearing up for higher energies.
