Particle accelerators play important roles across a wide range of science, medicine and engineering. They also tend to be very large and expensive facilities, which means that beam time on accelerators – be it for developing new materials or treating cancer – is precious and in short supply.
Lasers offer a way of accelerating particles in much smaller and cheaper facilities. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast we meet a physicist who has founded a company called Tau Systems, which aims to build a laser-driven accelerator facility. Based at the University of Texas at Austin, Manuel Hegelich explains how the technology works and how it could be used to create free electron lasers that would benefit scientists working on a wide range of topics.
Also in this episode, we chat about physicists who have won Nobel prizes in fields other than physics.
