2y ago

World's smallest particle accelerator is 54 million times smaller than the Large Hadron Collider, and it works

www.livescience.com

Hacker News @derp.foo

haxor @derp.foo

BOT

2y ago

World's Smallest Particle Accelerator

www.livescience.com /physics-mathematics/particle-physics/worlds-smallest-particle-accelerator-is-54-million-times-smaller-than-the-large-hadron-collider-and-it-works

53 comments

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.
- Around 1930 they had a particular accelarator at Berkeley called the Cyclotron...they had the coolest names back then
  
  Large Hadron Collider is also a cool name. Are there newer accelerators with uncool names, like "TD Bank Accelerator"?
  
  Melbourne has the Synchrotron
  
  Berkeley still has a cyclotron, though it’s a little newer (build in the 60’s) and much bigger.
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.
- the fact that the shooty fat ass boy worked at all was a miracle
- I thought at first you meant 28eV to 40keV and thought that's pretty impressive.
  Not that I know the implications of either.
Saying something is smaller than the LHC (even by orders of magnitude) isn't that hot a take. Few partical accelleraters are not smaller than the LHC.
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?
- Sounds more complicated than what it's worth tbh
  
  You underestimate what a truly random number generator would be worth then.
- You can already make/buy a Quantum RNG for truly random numbers.
Isn't the LHC large on purpose
- 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
Anything but the metric system..
Come on Wolfram Alpha, sort this shit out
(LHC (Large Hadron Collider) | diameter)/54000000
= 0.157mm
Looks like 3D printing guys have another item to put on the bench next to their cnc machines and printer.

53 comments