General Atomics is working on a “small, commercial particle accelerator”
Using off-the-shelf industrial parts, a team of researchers from the public and private sectors has created a prototype of a small particle accelerator that could have a big impact bringing the technology forward for commercial applications.If you're familiar with particle accelerators, you know that they're big. And expensive. And they take a long time to build. At the core of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, for example, is a 27-kilometer-long (17 miles) magnet-studded ring. That facility took about 10 years to bring…