Using beam weapons to zap ballistic missiles has been a dream since Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative. Now the U.S. Missile Defense Agency is looking for technologies that will enable space-based ...

In 2016, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) approved the high-luminosity large hadron collider (HL-LHC) upgrade project. LHC is currently the largest and most powerful particle ...

Physicists are learning to carve laser beams into intricate shapes that can grab hold of electrons and push them with a ...

James Benford presents his Ultrahigh Acceleration Neutral Particle Beam-Driven Sails at Space Access 2019. The Neutral Particle Beam-Driven Sails could enable an interstellar probe to alpha centauri ...

Shaping up: A new machine learning algorithm helps physicists reconstruct the shapes of particle accelerator beams from tiny amounts of training data. (Courtesy: Greg Steward/SLAC National Accelerator ...

Whenever SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's linear accelerator is on, packs of around a billion electrons each travel together at nearly the speed of light through metal piping. These electron ...

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory officially broke ground March 15 on a major new particle accelerator project that will power cutting-edge physics experiments for many decades to come. The new ...

Defense officials are taking a step back from one of its most ambitious research goals: launching a massive neutral-particle-beam generator, essentially a ray gun, into space to fry the electronics of ...

When a beam of energetic electrons travels through a plasma, the space charge at the tip of the beam knocks electrons from the ions in the plasma, leaving the ions with a larger positive charge. If ...

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The world's cutting-edge particle accelerators are pushing the extremes in high-brightness beams and ultrashort pulses to explore matter in new ways. To optimize their performance -- and to prepare ...

Using the Super Proton Synchrotron, the team created beams of electron-positron pairs and passed them through a meter-long region of plasma. This setup served as a scaled laboratory version of a ...