From Motherboard:
This Foot-Long Box Is the Most Advanced Particle Collider in the World
The CERN particle collider is 17 miles long. China just announced a supercollider that is supposed to be roughly 49 miles long. The United States' new particle collider is just under 12 inches long.
What it lacks in size, it makes up for in having a bunch of plasma inside of it, allowing researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif., to accelerate particles more than 500 times faster than traditional methods. In a recent test published in Nature, Michael Litos and his team were able to accelerate bunches of electrons to near the speed of light within this tiny chamber.
"If you want to build a next generation high energy physics particle collider, there are two ways of thinking," Litos told me.
First, he said, you could build them even bigger than the Large Hadron Collider or the proposed followup, Compact Linear Collider, which is supposed to be 31 miles long. "Or, you can build a comparable machine that reduces the physical footprint by an order of magnitude by taking information we know about plasma wakefield acceleration and using it," he told me. "All of a sudden, a 50 kilometer accelerator becomes something like 5 kilometers."
The preview can be seen at Nature - very cool!