Particle accelerators hold great potential for semiconductor applications, medical imaging and therapy, and research in materials, energy and medicine. But conventional accelerators require plenty of elbow room—kilometers—making them expensive and limiting their presence to a handful of national labs and universities.

Particle accelerators hold great potential for semiconductor applications, medical imaging and therapy, and research in materials, energy and medicine. But conventional accelerators require plenty of elbow room—kilometers—making them expensive and limiting their presence to a handful of national labs and universities.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, several national laboratories, European universities and the Texas-based company TAU Systems Inc. have demonstrated a compact particle accelerator less than 20 meters long that produces an electron beam with an energy of 10 billion electron volts (10 GeV). There are only two other accelerators currently operating in the U.S. that can reach such high electron energies, but both are approximately 3 kilometers long.