Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is there a better way to accelerate particles?

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Daniel and Jorge talk about why its so expensive to build a super collider and how plasma technology might make it all better, faster, cheaper. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Daniel, how much did the last particle accelerator cost? The LHC had a price tag of about $10 billion. dollars. Oh, is that it? And how much will the next one cost? Something like 50 to 100 billion, depending on the design. 50 to 100? You can narrow it down a little bit.

It's a 50 billion dollar difference there. We'd be happy with 50 billion. Thank you very much. I guess who's going to pay for it? We were going to send a request to the cartoonists of the world. You want cartoonists to pay for physics? It should be the other way around, I feel like. I guess we are constantly violating the laws of physics in cartoons.

And so why would you pay us? You guys are just rolling in it, aren't you? We're rolling in some. But maybe you should scale down your ambitions, so it's not as expensive. Well, you know, we want to solve the deepest mysteries of the universe. How do you scale down those ambitions? Isn't that kind of your job? Scaling things, putting things into perspective, shrinking down things to the quantum level?

And I want to scale our $10 billion budget to $100 billion. In quantum coins or what? In Bitcoins? Or QBit coins? There's definitely a lot of uncertainty. in whether we'll ever get that money. It's both a scam and a legit kind of currency. Hi, I'm Jorge McCartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I want all the science projects to get more money. Really? All of them. I'm sure there are some science projects. You're like, I don't know if we should do that. As long as they qualify science projects, I think we should invest in them. You know, the big government funding agencies, they get inundated in proposals every year. And a lot of them are really good ideas that they have to say no to because they don't have enough money. Yeah, that is pretty sad. There should be more money for science, right? Science is usually good. Usually, right? Your odds are pretty good of doing something good.

Yeah, it doesn't matter if you're studying the mating pattern. of ducks or the formation of the earth or what's inside black hole you are feeding the curiosity of humanity and history shows us that that is a good investment so sometimes people pitch scientists against other scientists saying like who should get this money but i think we should all get the money even the cartoonist the science of cartoons i guess that's a different agency in the government but anyways welcome to our podcast daniel and horhe explained the universe a production of iHeart radio in which we use science to try to push back the boundaries of human ignorance. We are amazed at this incredible and wonderful and beautiful universe that we find ourselves in,

but we want to do more than just appreciate it. We want to understand it. We want to decode its mysteries and explain all of them to you. That's right. It is a pretty amazing universe. And if you invest an hour of your time here with us today, we hopefully will give you returns in terms of you understanding how things work in appreciating this amazing and beautiful.

cosmos that we live in. That's right. Although you're welcome to invest more than just an hour of your time. Send us some cash, no problem. Do you take Bitcoins or Q Bitcoins? Hey, I'll take any donations from my science. Absolutely. Make out a check. Maybe it's just too expensive, Daniel. Have you thought if you reduce your prices, people will invest more in it. I would love to make science cheaper. You know, something that limits our understanding the universe is really just how much money we spend on it. It's like we're in the science candy store and we just have pennies in our pockets. But if we could figure out a way to make it all cheaper, then wow, we could just buy more secrets of the universe. What a day that would be. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Although they say

it all starts with the individuals, Daniel, so, you know, should we tell your university to cut your salary in half? So I should do half as much visits. Well, you know you could do twice as much for half the price. Yeah, and then I'll eat half as much, right? Sorry kids, you're not eating today, it's a Tuesday. And it's for science. So you can do a two for, yeah, you could do a hunger experiment and also make science cheaper for, you know, the mating patterns of certain animals in certain places. Sounds like we could learn a lot. But learn. We do aim to do here on the podcast. And so there's the rest of humanity in terms of understanding the universe from the immense galaxies out there floating in space to the tiny little particles that make up your body and everything that

you touch on an everyday basis. That's right. And we have a few ways. of understanding the universe. One thing we can do is just look out into the universe and find interesting stuff that's happening and try to learn from it. That's what astrophysicists have to do because as much as they want to shoot black holes at each other, they don't have a black hole collider.

So they have to wait for nature to set that up and do it for them. The other approach of course is to try to create the conditions we want to study here on Earth to set up the experiments that might force the universe to reveal one of its secrets to us. Yeah, and one of those strategies is to basically smash things together, is to collide tiny little particles and kind of see how you can break them, I guess.

That's kind of what you're trying to do, right, is you're trying to break little particles. Yeah, we are trying to break little particles. Essentially, we are trying to create new conditions that reveal the laws of physics. You know, we have a lot of experience with sort of slow-moving cold stuff, like baseballs flying through the air or things swimming through the ocean. Things aren't moving very, very fast. They don't have a whole lot of energy. So we think we understand that kind of physics, but we want to understand the physics of the whole universe.

We want to understand what happens when you push things really, really far, when you get really, really small. And in order to do that, we have to create those conditions. So we smash tiny particles together to make these really dense little blobs of energy that we hope reveal what the sort of underlying truth of the universe is. I guess, yeah, you're not really trying to break particles. You're trying to kind of smush them together and then see what the universe does with that smushed energy. Yeah, when particles get really close together, they interact, and that interaction can create new kinds of particles. One of the most amazing things about particle collisions is that it's not like chemistry. When you're doing chemistry, you combine like H2 and O2 to make water.

All the bits that went in just get rearranged, right? Every hydrogen nucleus that was there is still there. Every oxygen atom that was there is still there. But when we do particle collisions, that's not what happens. What comes out of the collisions, it's not just like a rearrangement of the bits. that went in like some big Lego project, those particles that go into the collisions, they get literally annihilated and turned into new kinds of matter. So we're not doing chemistry. We're doing alchemy. Although that's kind of what you think is happening, right? Like, you know, you're not quite

sure. Maybe inside of those little tiny particles are tiny little strings that do get kind of rearranged like Legos. Isn't that a possibility? Absolutely, that's right. There are many layers to our picture of the universe. Currently, we think about the particles that are interacting those quarks and the electrons as if they are fundamental objects, but it certainly might be that they are a merchant, that they are combinations of even smaller things. And so then what it means to annihilate that particle is in fact to break it into its smaller components, which then can't rearrange themselves. But if we can do that, then we hope to smash those components together and maybe annihilate them. And eventually we think when you get down to the universe at its most

basic building block, what you're really doing is annihilation of fundamental objects. So you're an an nihilist at heart. You're an nihilist physicist. I am an Annihist, absolutely. You subscribe to Anilism. Hey, at least it's an ethos, right? You should come up with your own kind of a punk rock music for that. But smashing things together, I guess it's one thing that you can learn how things work.

Because I guess when things are that small, you can't just like take a pair of tweezers and pry them open, right? Like that's kind of the only way you can really see what's inside of some of these fundamental particles. Yeah. And you really put your finger there on what we're trying to do. We're trying to see inside these particles. I mean, from one perspective, you could say you're annihilating them. From another perspective, you could say they're tearing them open. You're destroying the arrangement of whatever the smaller bits are, that is the electron or the

quark. In the end, what we're trying to do is pull them apart. And fundamentally, it's not that different from using tweezers. What do tweezers do? They apply a lot of force in one's very specific energy in order to break some bonds. And that's exactly what we're trying to do with these particles. We smash one proton against the other one, hoping that the high energy that the proton has will smash open the other proton, revealing what's inside of it. And maybe even the corks smashing together will reveal what's inside of them.

Well, smashing you have been doing at the Large Hadron Collider, where you were right now, you have sort of an appointment there. That's right. My main research program when I'm not goofing off doing podcasts or other projects is annihilating protons at the Large Hadron Collider. I'm a member of the Atlas Experiment, which has built a huge electric. device, which wraps around the point of collisions to take pictures of all the particles that fly out and try to learn things about what happened in all of those collisions. Yeah. And the whole point of the accelerator is to basically accelerate particles. You're speeding up the particles from standing still to almost at the speed of light, or at least

at a very high velocity. And then you smash them together to get higher and higher energies. But I guess maybe the problem is that the LHC is kind of showing its age now a little bit. Yeah, that's right. The LHC is big. And it's powerful and it was expensive, but it's also limited in its ability. The way we talk about these accelerators is basically by quoting their top speed, the most energy that we can put into the particles

that we're smashing together. The reason that that's the most interesting number, the one that really tells us like the discovery potential of this device is because it limits the kind of things that it can create. Like you take those two particles, you smash them together, what else can you make? Well, you might be able to have two other electrons come out

two other quarks or something else we already know about. But if you have enough energy, you might be able to build something new, something we haven't seen before because it requires more energy density than typically exists in the universe. So the more energy you have in your collider, the more you have access to like nature's hidden menu of particles, things that can exist in the universe, but don't typically because there aren't the conditions to make them. So the LHC is big and it's powerful, but it doesn't have infinite energy. Yeah, well, at the time it was built, it did sort of break, I mean, it definitely broke new ground in terms of how much energy you could get in an experiment.

But I guess you ran the LAC and it found the Higgs boson and all these amazing discoveries. And now you're kind of thinking about what's next. How can we get more energy? Yeah, we're always thinking about what's next. The collider that came just before the LHC was just outside Chicago. It was the Tevotron. It had about two terra electron volts. And the large HATron Collider has about 13 terraelectron.

like John Volz. And that's a big jump, right? That's like almost a factor of seven in terms of the territory we could explore. And imagine, for example, multiplying the territory you've explored by a factor of seven if you're in the field of like geology or, you know, planetary astronomy. You've only ever looked at Earth and now you can simultaneously land on seven new planets all at the same time and see what's there and learn all about it. So when we turned on the large hatron Collider, it's like we multiplied by a factor of seven, the sort of size of the particle universe that we were able to explore and to look at. And we didn't know what was there.

Every time we do these kinds of explorations, there could be huge surprises waiting for us or sort of nothing. And as you say, we found the Higgs boson, but we've been running for quite a few years and we haven't found anything else. And so now we're wondering like, hmm, what's around the next corner? If we crack open another energy range, will there be crazy discoveries waiting for? or just more dust and rubble. Yeah, so the LHC sort of got you to a certain level, which was amazing.

But I guess you feel like you've already explored this level. You've looked into every corner of this energy level, and you're kind of feeling like there's nothing else here. That's a very delicate political question as we seek approval for running the Large Hadron Collider for another 15 years because we're trying to make the science case that running it for a lot longer can look for really rare particles that maybe we missed. in sort of the first scoop. So we're sort of going in two directions at once.

One group of people is like, let's run this thing for as long as possible and maybe look for really rare stuff we might have missed. And the other group is looking towards the future and saying, hmm, can we build the next one? Can we plan now for the super LHC? The super LHC? Nice. Sounds like a superhero.

Well, I guess the problem is that the LHC was, it's big and it was a little expensive. But now if you want to get into higher energies, it gets even bigger and more expensive. right? With the same technology. It does. Basically, the only thing that limits us from building a bigger accelerator or from having built one instead of the LHC is money. The cost of the accelerator just scales with the size. Sort of like building a highway. It's like a million dollars per mile. More miles means more millions of dollars. So you want more energy. You got

to build a bigger collider, which costs more money. And so now people are wondering like, hmm, should we just spend 10 times as much money on a super duper version of this? Or should should we figure out a cheaper way to do it? Yeah, because I guess, first of all, you'll know that I said with the existing technology, it's going to be bigger and more expensive. And also, I don't think most scientists are going to cut their salary in half to make this a cheaper endeavor.

So I guess, like you said, we have to start looking at maybe new technologies. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. Is there a better way to accelerate? particles. I guess you've been using one way to accelerate particles all this time or several ways, right? We've been accelerating particles since about the 1930s, and we've had a series of sort of technological revolutions. People come up with a new idea to make them more powerful and make it like a big jump in energy. We're sort of at the end of one of those cycles.

We've been doing it the same way for a few decades now, and we can get sort of like little incremental increases without just making it bigger. And so it sort of feels like about the time that we need to jump to the next technology and figure out like a whole new way to do this kind of thing. Yeah, like if maybe the engineers figure out a better way to get particles moving, you could maybe make accelerators that are at the same energy or more, but a lot cheaper, right? That's the whole point. And maybe eventually you'll just have it on your phone. Eventually there's an app for that, you know, perhaps. For shooting light speed particles from your phone? That seems useful. Well, you do have a light speed accelerator on your phone right now.

I mean, you have a flashlight, which literally shoots out particles at light speed. Unfortunately, not high enough energy to do any interesting physics. But yeah, the dream is like, instead of having to collaborate with 5,000 people from all over the world on a $10 billion project, why can't I just build this thing on a tabletop in my own basement or in my lab here at UC Irvine for $200,000 or something and run my own experiments? Why can't everybody have their own plank scale particle collider to explore the nature of the universe? Why can't and why shouldn't, maybe, but that's not the topic today. The topic is, can that happen? Like, can you imagine a future where you can have a particle collider that's as powerful as the LHC, which is huge, which is several kilometers long and underground?

Can you maybe have that in like a little box in your basement? It's such a dream. I mean, imagine all the secrets we could learn. Those secrets that are just out there waiting for us if we only have the technology to crack them open. It's like we're in a room surrounded by locked boxes and we just don't have the key to any of them. You need the engineers to save you. It's kind of what you think. We definitely do need the engineers working closely with the physicist to figure this all out.

Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people had thought about this question of whether or not there's maybe a better way to accelerate particles. So thank you to everybody who answers these questions for the podcast to give us a sense for what people are thinking and what they already know. If you'd like to participate for a future episode, please don't be shy. me to questions at danielanhorpe.com so think about it for a second do you think there's a better way to accelerate particles here's what people have to say my understanding of current method is that we apply electromagnetic field to accelerate a particle and then they are propelled in high velocities in a in a tunnel i'm not sure if there's any other way that this could be done there must be of course but i don't think it will be that controlled and this might be more

feasible one. I have no clue how that can be done. Well, right away, I think about the fact that particles go to incredible speeds when they're orbiting a black hole in the accretion disc. So maybe gravity would be a better way to accelerate particles. I just have no idea how we would go about doing that. I think a better way to accelerate particles might be to give it more energy or like heat, because if you have a lot of energy, you're going to be moving fast. It also works the same way with heat. Because like if you're cold, you don't want to move, you stay in the same place. I suppose if you could get yourself a mini black hole and whip the particles around the event horizon, they might speed up pretty good. I was wondering when I asked these questions,

what if somebody actually came up with some super genius way to do this? But I end up like collaborating with them or like would they get the patent for it? I mean, it could have been thorny. Whoa. Like, would you have to pay them? Some of your salary? That would be such a difficult question. I'd hire them on this spot, absolutely. There are some pretty interesting ideas here. I think maybe there are, you know, it's maybe the next big idea.

It wasn't one of those answers. You think the mini black hole is the solution to the problem? Yeah. First, build a super collider to create mini black holes, then use those mini black holes to accelerate particles. It's like a bootstrap, yeah. Yeah, or gravity. That was kind of an interesting idea.

I mean, we use gravity all the time to accelerate spacecraft, right? We definitely do use gravity. Absolutely. And gravity does accelerate particles. Like particles fall towards the earth all the time. They're called cosmic rays. And they actually do achieve super high energies and create massive collisions in the atmosphere that physicists study and used to try to understand like how particles interact and what it all means. But those are a little more difficult to control. All right. Well, it's an interesting question. How do we accelerate particles faster, cheaper and better, I guess? Cheaper, faster, better. Isn't that the goal of any industry? Exactly. And then making an app. How do we do physics, cheaper, faster, better? Well, maybe step us through here. How do we currently accelerate particles? Like, how does the LHC exactly?

How does it get particles moving so fast? Well, I don't know if that pun was intended or not, but we currently use electrical currents to accelerate particles. Yes, that was totally on purpose. I wasn't trying to amp anything up or anything. I'm just trying to be a positive reinforcing partner on the podcast. Yes, I'm also just trying to, you know, kind of work the field here. This is why we don't charge for this podcast.

Let's stop with the electrifyingly terrible puns here. And let's get down in nuts and bolts. How are those nuts and bolts put together in the LHC? Moving past our magnetic senses of humor, essentially we can only accelerate charged particles. And the reason is that we use electric fields in order to do it. Electric fields can tug on charged particles. That's essentially what they are.

And so the basics is you want a particle moving fast. You put it in an electric field. the voltage there will accelerate the particle in one direction. That's like the super basic initial version of a particle accelerator. Meaning basically you set up like a magnet, right? And then you have the magnet attract charge particles and then that gets them moving. Well, we do have magnets, but magnets actually cannot accelerate particles. They can only bend them.

They can change their direction, but they can't speed them up. But an electric field can actually accelerate something. And so, for example, the old televisions that people, people used to watch, the ones that are not flat screens, had an electron accelerator in the back of them. They had a little gun that would accelerate electrons across an electric field and shoot it at the back of the screen. And that's what actually made the images. So everybody used to have their own little particle accelerator in their house shooting into their brains every night. And that uses an electric field. It's basically a cathode tube. We have a voltage applied and it boils

electrons off of one of the nodes and towards the other one. I guess what I'm saying is it basically basically works like a magnet, right? Catherray tube is basically you're using magnetism to move the electrons along. Yeah, I mean, you're using electromagnetism more generally. You're using the electric field to accelerate it. And then you had a magnet in order to steer the electrons. So yeah, absolutely, it's all electromagnetism. And that's why, for example, we have proton accelerators and electron accelerators. We don't have neutron accelerators or neutral atom accelerators because things have to have a charge in order for an electric field to push on them. Yeah, I guess. That's just kind of generally, that's how things push and pull most of the time you hear on Earth, right?

Like when I pick up a glass of water or when you push on the door, you're really using electromagnetic forces to push those things. Yeah, that's absolutely right. A baseball is tugged by gravity, but most of the interactions you have are really electromagnetic interactions. The electrons of the tip of your finger are pushing against the electrons in the wall and resisting. That's why things seem to be solid because the forces that fill the space between the tiny little particles. That's what gives volume, volume. And so that's what constructs our world. Absolutely. It would be a very, very different world without electromagnetic forces. Yeah, you just made me realize like all the neutrons in our bodies and the objects around us, we're not really pushing them

directly, right? Like, it's more like our electrons are pushing the electrons in those atoms and those electrons are pushing the protons in the nucleus. And then those are the ones that are pushing on the neutrons inside of atoms. Yeah, the protons and the neutrons stick together using the strong force. And so that's what clumps them together. Yeah, it's all a big dance of the forces we've discovered to make the world that we know and love. All right. Well, that's the basic way that Tilleries work right now is using electromagnetic fields. Let's get into a little bit more detail about that. And then also talk about maybe new ways that we can get particles going for better and more powerful colliders. But first, let's take a quick break.

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Or 50s or 30s? So the very first accelerators were like in the 30s and the 40s. They got more powerful in the 50s, which is what Harold did like the era of the particle zoo as people were smashing particles together at higher energies and discovering all sorts of stuff. But it basically started with just accelerate things over a gap. And then people tried to reuse that gap multiple times. So like, you know, if you go across that gap, you speed up. Can we go across that cap more than once?

So they had accelerators called cyclotrons where a particle would go in a circle, and go across the gap multiple times. And it had synchotrons where you got even more sophisticated and you would try to like sync up the energy in the gap with when the particle was going faster and faster. And so I think the basic idea is that if you have an electron, first of all, you sort of create an electron and you kind of put it out there in space, in the air, by itself.

And then you basically hold a positive electric charge ahead of it, basically, or a negative charge behind it. And then that electromagnetic repulsion or attraction then moves your electron forward. and that's how you get it going. Yeah, that's basically how you do it. And you can imagine doing that with like a battery, for example. A battery can create that kind of voltage difference between two plates by shuttling the electrons

from one side to the other. So then if you put an electron in the gap there, it'll get pushed towards the lower voltage. And that's what the acceleration is. So essentially, yeah, you arrange the charges to give you an electric field to push on an electron and that will accelerate it. Yeah, like you said, like in a battery, like a battery will maybe concentrate the electrons in a coil or wire or plate towards the back and then that will push your single electron forward. But there's only kind of so much that you can push it, right, doing it that way.

Yeah, there's only so much you can push it. You can try to pump a lot of energy into that electric field, but eventually things will break down. Like if you have two pieces of metal and you put a really strong electric field across them, eventually it will pull the electrons out of that metal and break down the electric field. And then what you do is once the electron gets going, then you use another. electric field up ahead to accelerate it even more. Yeah, so because you can't put an infinite amount of energy into a single one of these sort of like little accelerators because it'll break down the way like lightning is like a

breakdown of the voltage between the air and the ground, then you stack them up. You say, well, I'm going to have one and then I have another one. Then I might have another one. You just sort of like line these things up so that each one gives your electron a little bit of a push. Yeah. And I guess initially in the 50s they would use, they would put these in a straight line, right? you accelerate an electron with one accelerator and then then the next one picks it up and

accelerates it even more and you sort of like a tunnel or a gun or like a the barrel of a rifle and that gets your electrons going even faster exactly there's a little bit of a wrinkle there though because what happens when your electron passes a sort of negative potential plate of the first one is it wants to slow down if you imagine like a bunch of positive charges there that are pulling the electron towards that first plate what happens when it passes it now those positive charges are pulling it back. And so people develop these really fancy techniques to oscillate the voltage across those plates. So when the particle is moving towards it, pulling it towards it. And then just as it passes, it flips the charges and pushes it away. So we have these like

RF cavities. They're called with these oscillating fields that are timed perfectly to speed the particles up and then avoid slowing them down. And as you say, the strategy to making them bigger and longer and faster is just to stack them up to like make a big, tunnel and put a bunch of these in there. Yeah, that's how they did it initially. But then at some point, they figured out that you can get even more acceleration by having the particles go in a circle and basically go through this accelerating part multiple times and then they can go faster and faster and faster each time.

Yeah, so the one design of the accelerator is called a linear accelerator. There's one like that at Stanford. There's one like that in Germany. We just shoot them down a tunnel. It's a one go. You speed them up. You get them to as fast as you can and then you collide them at the end. But another strategy is to reuse the tunnel.

by having it go in a circle. And so as you say, you have like something that gives it a kick and then you have something that bends it. And you have something that bends it. And so the large Hadron Collider is like that. It's a big circle and the particles move around the tunnel. And there's segments that push it and then segments that bend it using very powerful magnets. Bended, you mean like as in they make the particles kind of go right a little bit

and then that makes them go in a circle. Yeah. So the particles move not actually in a perfect circle because they move in straight lines. through the little mini accelerator segments and then they bend through the magnet. So it's more like a really big polygon with a bunch of straight sides. Yeah, I guess the difference is sort of like

between a slings shot, like you pull back and then you let go and the rubber bands throw the rock forward or whatever you're trying to shoot and using a sling where you like put the rock in a little sling and then you spin and spin it. Each time you spin it, you make it go faster and then at some point you let it go.

Yeah, or if we're going to use like kid analogies, it's like the difference between a slide. You start at the top and you go fast and you hit the bottom. Or a merry-go-round where your friend can keep pushing it faster and faster and faster and you're going around faster and faster until you both throw up. And that's really what particle physics is all about, right? Throwing up what's inside of the fundamental particles. Yeah, we're exploring the vomit frontier in the end.

That's right. You're vomit physicist. Nileist vomiting physicists. And that's basically the technology of the Large Hadron Collider is push and bend, push and bend, and what limits the Large Hadron Collider is essentially the size of the tunnel. Building that kind of tunnel and filling it with all that technology is expensive. But in order to get fast, you got to go big. Well, maybe talk a little bit about why it needs to be bigger.

It's because of the limitations in the magnets that bend the path of the particles, right? Like if you can get stronger magnets or a better way to kind of curve the path of these particles, then you could have the same circle, but just have the particles go faster in it. Yeah. If you had stronger magnets that could bend them more effectively at the same space. speed, then yeah, you could have a smaller circle, which means you could reuse the same linear accelerating segments at the same magnets more times, right? So it would go around more times to get the same speed, but you could build a smaller device instead of having to be like tens of

kilometers around, right? This tunnel, the large engine collider is filled with tens of kilometers of these things, right? It's not a small device. But if the magnets were more powerful and you could bend it, then you could basically shrink the size of that circle and the whole thing would be smaller and cheaper. Right, because I guess the problem is that the faster the particles go, the harder it is to get them to go in a circle, right? Because the faster they're going, the kind of more, I guess, centrifugal force, you need to kind of keep them in a circle. Yeah, you need strong magnets to move very high-speed particles in a circle. It's a centripetal force towards the center that keeps something moving in a circle. The same way the Earth moves around

the sun because of the force of gravity, pulling it towards the sun. So we can make these particles kind of like orbit the center of the collider using these magnets to bend their path to provide that same kind of force. And if we could provide a stronger force, we could bend them in a tighter circle. Yeah. So like right now, you probably could accelerate the particles faster. Like you can't make them go faster, but you wouldn't be able to basically control them. Like if you accelerated them any faster, they would basically go off the rails kind of, right?

Like they would start hitting the walls of your collider and that would burn them up and then you'd poke a hole in your tunnel. then the whole thing goes kaput. That's right. We're limited either by the magnet technology or by the size of the tunnel. Like we can make the tunnel bigger with the same magnets and then we could get to higher energy or we could make the tunnel smaller with stronger magnets to get to the same energy. But if we had the same tunnel and we just whizzed them around more and kept pushing on them,

then eventually we would not be able to contain them using our magnets that would just slam into the wall. So if you increase the energy, do you have someone down there at the basement going, she cannot take any more captain yeah that's a specific job absolutely yeah and you have to hire a scotman from your collaboration to do that no we prefer panamanians who do a Scottish accent actually oh yeah that's just as good no comment for our Scottish listeners but our magnet technology is pretty awesome I mean we have superconducting magnets down there we're really pushing the limits of what magnets can do And so one way we could improve particle colliders is to make some breakthrough in magnet technology

to make these things more powerful and smaller or cheaper. What's the limitation, I guess? Is it just that the magnets, you're already running as much current as you can through these magnets or what? Yeah, we're running as much current as we can without them breaking down. They're already cooled down to a few degrees Kelvin. So we can take advantage of their superconducting nature, which means we get super duper strong magnets out of our current. and they don't like heat up and distort.

Maybe you remember that when we turned on the Large Hadron Collider, there was a disaster in 2009 just a few months in. And some of the liquid helium that was keeping this thing cool sprayed out everywhere and the whole thing warmed up and it was a big disaster. So these things are not easy to operate and to keep functional. One of the many ways that the beam can go wrong is something we call a quench when one of the magnets basically fails and the beam just like gets dumped into the rock. And so we're really operating at the limit of magnet technology.

All right. Well, then I guess the idea is that is there like a revolutionary new technology or a totally different way of doing the whole particle accelerating thing that could maybe like let you get away with faster velocities without having these gigantic tunnels and these superconducting magnets. Oh, there is and I'm dying to talk about it. Well, step us through this, Daniel. What is this amazing technology called and how does it work? So the idea is instead of making the magnet stronger, can we make the accelerator part much more? powerful. Can we accelerate particles to much higher energies over a shorter distance? And remember before, the limitation was that we couldn't have strong enough electric fields across two metal plates because it would like make a breakdown between those plates. Remember that right now in our colliders, these particles are accelerated through a vacuum.

So between those plates, it's not like air. So you're not getting like ionization of the air the way you do when you have like static electricity or lightning jumping from the ground to the earth. It's really a pure breakdown of the metal. You're like pulling the electrons off of the metal. And so in order to avoid this breakdown, people are thinking, well, maybe we shouldn't have a vacuum. Maybe we should fill that with something in order to avoid a breakdown. And so one idea is to use a plasma instead of having a vacuum.

So let me see if I get this straight. It's sort of like the same technology where you have plates, like metal plates. And in these plates, you basically like run a current through them so that you kind of make a magnet, basically. But now the twist is that instead of having it in a vacuum, you put it into. of a plasma. That's right. We use a plasma instead of having a vacuum, but now we don't have the external electric field provided by some plates. Now we use the plasma itself to generate the electric fields internally. So wait, there's no plates. There's no plates at all, no. But we think that it's possible to generate much stronger electric fields within the plasma than it is between two metal

plates in a vacuum. Okay, so you use the plasma as to plate, kind of? Exactly. And so you take this plasma and you like zap it with a laser which rearranges all the charges within the plasma in such a way to create very strong electric fields inside the plasma that can then be used to accelerate particles. That's the basic idea. So what would this look like? Like a like a tube basically kind of or a tunnel filled with plasma and then you're shooting lasers into this to create kind of like variations in the electric fields inside of the plasma. Exactly. Remember that a plasma is just really hot gas. Like you take hydrogen. Hydrogen is a proton, an electron. The electron is happily orbiting the nucleus, the proton. And if you give that electron more energy, it goes up an energy

level, sort of a larger orbital radius. And you keep doing that. Eventually, the electron goes free. And so that's what a plasma is. The electrons have so much energy that they're not bound anymore to the protons. So it's a charged gas, right? It has positive and negative charges all flowing around in it. Unlike neutral hydrogen, which is, you know, protons and electrons bound tightly together so they're effectively neutral. So this plasma is like microscopically charged, but typically it's like macroscopically neutral. You take like a big chunk of it has the same number of electrons and protons. But you can induce waves in it. You can like pull on the electrons or zap all the electrons, get them to move in one direction, which will create an electric field

within the plasma. Like you create, you're creating a current of electrons inside of the plasma. Is that what you mean? What you actually do is create like a wake field inside of it. So it's not literally a current, but yeah, you're creating like these waves of electrons through the plasma. They're like density waves where the electrons are like wiggling. And that creates electromagnetic fields, which you can then use to accelerate particles. So you have this tube, as you said, of plasma, and you zap it with a laser. And you choose the laser frequency just right to excite oscillations in the electrons in the plasma to create this wake field. And then you dump your particle into it and it sort of like surfs along this electromagnetic field.

you've created with your laser and it gets shot at the end going much, much faster. Interesting. All right. Well, maybe take a step, a little bit of a step back here. How does the laser cause the electrons to form into waves? Like, do electrons interact with photons? Is that the idea? Electrons do interact with photons. And so lasers are just like a great way to dump energy into the plasma. And typically you can think about a plasma as like a bunch of individual particles. You You know, you have protons, you have electrons, they have charges so they can interact with photons and fields and all this stuff. But that's a little bit of a nightmare because there's so many of them. It just seems like a buzzing chaos.

But you could also think about the plasma sort of like collectively and think about the collective motion of the electrons. So plasmas have like tiny little local behavior, but they also have sort of like long distance collective behavior. You can get plasmas to do things like have waves moving through them. And so if you dump a laser beam in. to it with the right frequency, you can sort of excited to do these waves. The same way you can if you like slap your hand against the surface of a lake and do it at the right frequency, you can get the lake to like produce these waves. But I guess the main mechanism is that it's interacting with the electrons because I guess light doesn't interact with the protons.

The light does interact with the protons as well, right? Protons are also charged. Remember protons are much more massive than electrons. And so the same energy doesn't accelerate those protons to move as much. So this whole thing happens really, really fast, basically before the protons can sort of get out of bed. The electrons have this big wave that passes through them and the protons are like, huh, what? Sort of like me in this podcast right now. All right, well, let's react to that laser bit of knowledge there and let's dig a little bit more into this effect and how you can use it to accelerate particles maybe faster than the large Hadron Collider. But first, let's take another quick break.

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Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're talking about a new way to a calorie particles that is maybe faster and cheaper and better than the current technology, which is at the Large Hadron Collider. And so this technology involves using a plasma. So you have a plasma, which is like a gas where all of the atoms

have been broken down into single electrons and maybe protons or at least clumps of protons. And so you have this soup of all this stuff floating around that has a charge. And then you shoot a laser into it and somehow that laser excites things or maybe it causes electrons to clump. or to scatter, what exactly is happening there?

It causes the electrons to wiggle. It creates like a wave of the electrons moving through the plasma. And again, you choose it very specifically, the laser pulsed length to be resonant with the modes of the plasma. Everything that can wiggle, everything we could describe in terms of like wave physics, has resonant frequencies. The way, for example, your shower is really good at amplifying certain frequencies when you're singing and not others.

Or guitar strings like to oscillate at certain frequencies. not others. They're resonant frequencies in the same way they're like a laser is made to use a resonant cavity. And so the equations of the motion of the electrons through the plasma allow for certain frequencies of collective motion where the electrons will like slosh back and forth all together. Instead of getting like a bunch of individual electrons doing their own thing, you get this like collective behavior of all the electrons if you push it the right way. Sort of like pushing your kid on a swing, right? You push it the right frequency and your kid can get going really, really fast. you push it like random times, then you're going to get like chaotic motion of the swing.

And I guess that's what the light is doing, like the photon will hit electrons in a certain way and because of the frequency does it in different ways in different locations. And that's how you create the wave inside of the plasma. Exactly. So in order to do this, you need laser pulses. You're not just like shining a bright laser beam into this thing and heating up all the electrons. You're doing laser pulses so that you have like laser pulses at different locations through the plasma at the same time. So those pulse length and the pulse timings have to be just right to excite this motion in the plasma.

You're like push on the right electrons at the right moment across the plasma to get this thing going. I guess it's sort of like you said, it's like having a pool and then you have kind of like a wave maker in the back, like one of those pool and those water parks, right? You're like you're using the laser to create waves in the pool and then you're sort of dropping like a little kid in a life preserver and then they will get pushed by the waves to the shallow end. That's kind of the idea, right? That's the idea. And the reason this works better than the previous approach of just having like two metal plates and an electric field across them

is because you can have much, much stronger electric fields in a plasma without anything breaking down. Basically, the plasma is already broken down, right? There's nothing else to break down. So like there's no limit to how much you can bunch electrons together or something within a plasma. Or maybe they kind of is, right? Isn't there?

Like you can't bunch electrons infinitely. You can't bunch it. infinitely, but you can dump a lot of energy into this plasma. And the cool thing is your laser beam doesn't have to have as much energy sort of per photon. You can just do a lot of photons to end up with a lot of energy. So you don't need to already have a super high energy laser to create a super high energy particle beam. You can use a high intensity laser to dump a lot of energy into the plasma, which creates these fields and then accelerate the particles to very high energy. now which particles are you accelerating then the electrons in the plasma or the protons in the plasma or are you trying to accelerate something else neither right so then you dump in a particle bunch that you're trying to accelerate and they move through the plasma following this wake following the wake of these electrons they're sort of like the surfers wouldn't you be accelerating protons too aren't protons part of the soup like how do you know like if you have a soup with a wave instead of like in our pool analogy you have a wave maker in the back and you're trying to accelerate uh

a drop of water you dump into it. So the protons in the plasma don't get accelerated because they don't respond on this time scale. The whole thing happens like too fast for them to even get moving. The electrons in the plasma, they do get excited and you do get this wave through the plasma. And then you have a third bunch which sort of rides that electric wave. The wake of that electron wave is a very high gradient electric field, which will accelerate a particle that's put in just the right location and velocity. the same way a surfer needs to catch a wave to ride it,

they need to be in the right spot and already going at the right speed. That's why the surfer rides the wave, but the other things are left behind. And so you have this like third group, which rides that wake, sort of like the surfer on the wave, right? Right, but except that the surfer is made out of water too. Yes, in this case, the server is made out of matter. The waves are made out of matter, right? It's just a question of where you are and how fast you're already going.

And so if you're in the right location, if it's timed just right, then you're riding that wave and you're constantly getting accelerated. Whereas electrons in these waves are sort of sloshing back and forth. I guess what's confusing me is that I feel like if you drop a bunch of electrons into an electron soup, they'll just get, you know, absorbed by the soup, you know. But maybe the right way to think about it is more like you have this wave pool. You're making the waves and then you shoot some, there's a jet of water in the back that's shooting it towards the shallow end.

and somehow it kind of gets an extra boost of speed by the waves. If you just dropped electrons into any random spot in the plasma, they would become part of the plasma. But if you set up this wave and then inject particles at the right place with the right speed, they can ride the wave generated by the plasma without becoming part of the plasma. All right, that's the technology. It's using plasma. But plasma is kind of tricky, right? Plasma is super duper hard and it's really hard to contain. And you also need magnets to contain plasma.

So how well does this technology work? Well, it works really, really well so far. It's taken decades. Like, the original ideas are from, like, the 50s. And then in the 70s, people started working on the first prototypes. It was actually here at UC Irvine, a guy named Norm Rostoker, who pioneered this technology together with his grad student, Toshiki, Tejima. But they were limited by the laser technology.

You need, like, really, really fast pulses. And then in the 90s, people developed, like, super ultra-fast, linked lasers. And that's when the first demonstration was performed. But by now, people have been doing it all over the world and they've been able to create these little accelerators that can accelerate particles to very high speeds over short distances. And we typically measure this in terms of like how much energy can you dump into a particle per centimeter, right? Because you want to accelerate a particle and you don't want to have to take a mile or two miles to do it. And so these little plasma accelerators have been able to accelerate particles to much higher energies per

centimeter than the traditional approach by a factor of like a hundred or a thousand cool but I guess you know how are they overcoming the difficulties in the problem right like how do you first of all maintain a plasma that's pretty hard and then how do you shoot electrons into it and how do you get them out of the plasma so maintaining the plasma is not always that hard right like you have plasma in the fluorescent lights that are above you or it's just very dilute and so it doesn't like destroy the glass and you typically think about plasma as being really hard to contain in the case of like fusion experiments when you need a certain density also in order to enact fusion. We don't want fusion happening in these plasmas. So they don't have to be

actually that dense. So the containment is not nearly as challenging as it is in the case of fusion experiments. You can just basically have a can of the plasma and it's all right. And that's enough to get particles going? That's enough to get particles going. The main challenge was really the lasers and now they've solved that. And so now they've really demonstrated this. They have these devices that can actually accelerate particles to like tens of GEV over centimeters or tens of centimeters, which is very exciting. It's exciting because it's a small amount, but you're also, you're thinking ahead and you're thinking we're going to stack these up to get like a thousand of these to get a terra electron volt.

Exactly. So now the question is, can they scale? What they've done is they've proven the principle that you can accelerate particles more effectively over short distances. But we're not that interested in tiny little accelerators. We still want them kind of. big so we can get to really high energies and so the question is can you stack these things up and that's where the technological struggle is right now because what you need to do is like match these things up you need to keep these things in sync when you have the particles that you're accelerating come out of one stage of a plasma accelerator and you want to send them into the next one then you have to like time the laser pulses in that next plasma accelerator perfectly so like your little

bunch of accelerating particles hit just the right part of the wave otherwise everything is lost and in in order to get that all that timing just perfectly in sync is very, very challenging. So what they've been able to do is match a couple of stages, maybe up to like five stages, but nobody's confident that they can do it for like a hundred or a thousand, which is the kind of thing you would need to do to really get to like physics level accelerators where we start answering deep questions about the universe. So we're maybe still kind of far away because you would need to be able to think and stack. like you're saying, hundreds of these in a row or maybe one in a circle.

Is the idea to put them all in a row and for a straight accelerator or to maybe replace the accelerators at the LHC? It depends on what you want to accelerate. For electrons, you can't really accelerate them in a circle because when you bend electrons in a circle, they radiate away photons and they lose their energy really, really fast. Protons, however, you can accelerate them in a circle and because they have more mass, they tend to radiate less. So that's why protons accelerators tend to be circles and electron accelerators.

tend to be straight lines. So people want to do both. They want to do straight electron accelerators and they want to curve protons into circles to smash them together. Protons, we can tend to get to higher energies because of these circular colliders. I think this technology has come a long way

in the last few decades. It's definitely not ready for prime time. Nobody's like proposing, let's build one of these things in five years or in 10 years. But there are like larger and larger demonstration experiments being built and that are working and lots of different ideas

that people are using to develop these things, not just laser pulses. There's ones where you drive it with a proton beam and all sorts of other variations. It's a very exciting area and it might be in like, you know, a couple of decades that we're ready to talk about like building a LHC size or super LHC size particle accelerator

that's significantly smaller than the other plans we have. So this technology will also accelerate protons? It can also accelerate protons, yes. But then I guess you'll run into the same problem that you have in the LHC. Like, you can make them go faster, but then you still need the magnets to bend them into a circle or you need to build a bigger circle. Yeah, you'll still have that problem if you want to bend it into a circle.

But if you have a super duper plasm accelerator, maybe you just get them up to super high speeds in a straight line, which could also work for protons. I mean, if it's powerful enough, then you don't need to go around many, many times. Interesting. Well, there's a lot of promise there, it sounds like. It's definitely something people are hoping is around the corner and that might revolutionize the way we're doing particle physics because the way we're doing particle physics because the way we're doing it right now definitely doesn't seem sustainable. I mean, particle physicists are talking about

the next generation of colliders and how it's going to cost $100 billion and I'm all for it, you know, of course, but I'm pretty skeptical that governments are going to pony up that much money for another experiment. And so I'm looking forward to, you know, the revolution that makes particle physics cheaper, faster, better. Did I tell you I once went to a conference for this technology? No, you didn't. Did it accelerate your mind? Yeah, I got smashed. My brain got smashed. tiny bits. All right. Well, there's a lot of promise in this new way of accelerating things, but it also sounds like there's a ton of challenges because you still have to scale these up and you still have to maybe potentially bend them into a circle. Which city should we build the next

giant particle collider under? Pasadena. Oh, good, good. Not South Pasadena. Exactly. Always your neighbors. All right. Well, hopefully that made you think a little bit about how scientists are out there trying to break things apart and trying to uncover what's inside of the fundamental particles that make up nature and matter itself. That's right, because to answer the deepest questions in the universe, we need to develop more and more technology. We need better and more clever engineers to give us the tools we can use to ask these questions. And maybe it's going to be plasma technology or maybe it's going to be something totally different that somebody else out there thinks up.

We need more money or cheaper physicists. One of the two. But don't skimp on the engineers. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of family secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their guests. courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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