In the October 21 2022 issue of the journal PHYSICAL REVIEW X researchers report they were able to build a prototype machine that could accelerate electrons in a straight line until they had 5 billion electron volts of energy in just 20 cm. The LHC accelerates protons in a circle with a circumference of 27,000 meters, it can produce protons that have 13.6 trillion electron volts. I figure if they could make a machine longer than their 20 cm prototype that had the same acceleration rate, a straight line linear accelerator would only need to be 544 meters long to make high energy electrons with 13.6 trillion electron volts, the same energy as the LHC's high energy protons. And high energy electrons are more useful, although harder to make, than high energy protons. And unlike the LHC it wouldn't need any very expensive superconducting magnets.
One of the most expensive parts of the new Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machines are their light sources, a free electron laser is tunable and can produce a very bright light beam from microwaves to well into the X-ray range, they are certainly capable of producing super bright point sources of extreme ultraviolet light needed for EUV; the trouble is producing electrons with enough energy to do this would be even more expensive than the current method of using vaporize tin, but that could change. Back in the 1970s researchers made an electron linear accelerator that was 2 miles long and could accelerate electrons up to 50 billion electron volts (with this new technology it would only need to have been 2 meters long). Much more recently they converted the machine into a free electron laser and it works great. Perhaps with this new technology it would be practical to use a free electron laser in chip lithography machines, you'd need high energy electrons to do it but you wouldn't need anything as huge as 13.6 trillion electron volts. Multi-GeV Electron Bunches from an All-Optical Laser Wakefield Accelerator <https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.12.031038> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> udd -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1oTFQO2LnznhDjN6zGoe3LuFZeWJN4autfMtCRZXM%2BAA%40mail.gmail.com.
