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Miniature Particle Accelerator Powering the Laser

23.07.2021

Chinese scientists have built a free electron laser, which can be considered a miniature (installation length - only 12 meters) version of multi-kilometer particle accelerators.

Physicists in China at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (SIOM) have used a small "wake field plasma accelerator" to power a laser called a free electron laser (FEL).

Physicists have long wanted to make particle accelerators more compact, so the work of Chinese scientists who have made significant progress towards this goal is encouraging. The Chinese free electron laser is still inferior to classical particle accelerators in terms of capabilities, but this is forgivable, given the relatively modest size of the facility.

The tiny FEL is very different from its larger counterparts, which generate beams billions of times brighter than other X-ray sources, with an energy spread of just 0,1%. It produces much weaker pulses of longer wavelength ultraviolet light with an energy spread of 2%.

With its length of 12 meters, it is nowhere near as good as its predecessors, which are several kilometers long. Nevertheless, the experiment marks a major breakthrough in the field of mini-accelerators.

Particle accelerators are workhorses in countless fields of science, they explode elementary particles and generate intense beams of X-rays to study biomolecules and materials. Such accelerators stretch for miles and cost $1 billion or more.

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X-ray for communication in space 06.04.2019

NASA has announced it is testing a new XCOM communication system based on X-rays. This will allow scientists to transmit gigabytes of information per second over long distances in space.

The International Space Station (ISS) plans to install a new XCOM communication system that will use X-rays. In this regard, NASA engineer Goddard Jason Mitchell said that they had been waiting for this for quite a long time to demonstrate this possibility.

Now scientists use radio to communicate with spacecraft, but it has limited capabilities. Short wavelength X-rays should allow more information to be transmitted than radio waves using the same amount of energy.

Radio communication also becomes unavailable under certain conditions, for example, when a spacecraft enters the dense layers of the Earth's atmosphere and thermal energy becomes a barrier to communication. In such cases, communication with the astronauts or the apparatus may be lost for several minutes.

The XCOM system can solve this problem and overcome the plasma shield of an aircraft or capsule that descends in the atmosphere. True, the technology is not yet considered for use on the surface of the Earth, since it can be dangerous due to radioactive X-rays and a large amount of energy in its waves.

NASA is due to begin the first XCOM tests at the end of April 2019 when they launch the modulated MXS X-ray source to the ISS. The device will be controlled through the NavCube GPS receiver, which was sent to the ISS last year.

In the future, the system should transmit information much faster to probes in remote places in the solar system or even beyond.

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