Scientists have created the world's first nanophotonic electron accelerator, which speeds negatively charged particles with mini laser pulses and is small enough to fit on a coin.
It's interesting that people only really became aware of particle accelerators in the LHC sense. CRT televisions are also particle accelerators. It's nothing too super new.
Well, it is a million times smaller and a million times weaker. It accelerates from 28 to 40keV. So it a) already needs a pre-accelerator as input, and b) just adds about 35% to it.
Your run-of-the-mill CRT back in the times was an eccelerator, too, with something like 10keV, btw.
I've got an unconventional application idea for this particle accelerator on a chip.
True random number generation. There's loads of random information that can be measured from such a device in a controlled manner.
If you could fit one of these on a motherboard then you wouldn't even need to call a pseudo random number generator algorithm anymore, you can pull data directly from the chip.
There's already hardware RNGs on computer chips -- e.g. the RDRAND instruction on most x86 chips from the last decade or so uses a hardware entropy source as part of its behavior. The quality, of course, is one of those things people go "Uh, can I really trust this...?" about though.
Additionally, PRNGs still have uses even if you do trust hardware RNGs; determinism is a very useful property in software -- it is way, way easier to debug something deterministic (by running a PRNG with a specific seed over and over while testing) even if you want the final version to be randomized unpredictably for users. They also tend to be faster.
I’ve heard that you could pull random numbers from a basic thermometer. Is a hardware RNG just based on measuring the random noise of some measurement like that?
This one has a different purpose. The LHC is for high energy experiments to discover new things about physics. The little one is potentially useful for medicine, to direct particles at target cells inside the body, for example to kill cancer cells