Dragon Fire, Plasma-Wakefield Accelerators, and a future Higgs Factory · 10:50pm Nov 26th, 2023
A short crossover between The Isle of Scaly and A hybrid, asymmetric, linear Higgs factory based on plasma-wakefield and radio-frequency acceleration.
Blaize lifted her wings and stared at Sunny Starscout.
“Why are you here?”
“It’s… to help,” said Sunny
“Pretty sure we don’t need your help.”
She turned to walk away. Sunny called her back.
“Actually, you do. We heard you want to build a Higgs factory for your future particle physics research programme. We have a lot of experience with accelerator technology.”
“She’s right,” said Izzy. “Our RF cavities are the best in Equestria.
Blaize gave a dismissive look.
“Why bother with radio frequency cavities,”
“RF cavities are great,” said Izzy. “You take a big metal pillbox, and a high-power radio transmitter, and you blast your radio waves inside so they make a resonant electric field pattern that can accelerate your particles.”
“That won’t work for us,” said Blaize. “It’s too big. If you push the electric field gradient more than ten megavolts per metre, and you get breakdown. If you want to accelerate electrons to the energies you would need to make a Higgs, it would have to be fifty kilometres long. We don’t have time to dig tunnels like that.”
“But what else can you do?”
The dragon lifted her muzzle up and breathed out a mouthful of dragon fire. She looked back down and smiled.
“Use a plasma-wakefield. Then you can make a hundred-gigavolt-per-metre gradient over less than a tenth of a millimetre.”
“Plasma-wakefield acceleration!” cried Izzy. “You can do that?”
“I read about it,” said Sunny. “Twilight Sparkle described its potential as the future of particle physics research. But I never thought that was possible.”
“It has taken thousands of years to develop, and we still need to perfect the technique,” admitted Blaze.
“What is a plasma-wakefield?” asked Zipp.
“Picture a boat travelling through the water,” said Blaize, “or a dragon, or pegasus, flying fast through the clouds. As you push the air out of the way, you leave a wake. Now, if you create a plasma of dragon fire – a low pressure gas heated so the electrons dissociate from the atoms, then you blast a terawatt laser pulse through, it pushes the electrons out of the way, like a boat pushes away the water. The heavy ions are left behind, and the charge separation gives a big electric field over a very short distance—a plasma wave. You just need to shoot in an electron beam, and the electrons will surf the wave to giga-eV energies.”
“If you get the phase right,” said Izzy.
“It’s tricky”, admitted Blaze. “But we’ve done it in tests. Now we want to build a real particle collider. One that has a chance of seeing something new. Proton-proton colliders are now very last season. The next big thing has to be a electron-positron Higgs Factory. Smash electrons and their antiparticles at enough energy to make Higgses in a nice clean environment, without all the mess you get from protons. Then we can really study the Higgs Boson and see if our measurements match the theory.”
“Can you do that?”
“Almost. We can do the electron part fine. We’re just having a bit more trouble with the positron beam. Electrons can surf an electron wave, but it doesn’t work that way for positrons. We being trying to find another way, but it’s much harder.”
“Why not build a hybrid?” said Izzy. “You can make a high energy electron beam with your plasma-wakefield. And we’ll do a positron beam with a radio cavity. Then put them together and—kaboom—lots of Higgses.”
“But you would still need a really long tunnel for your positron accelerator if it is to match the electron beam.”
“Does it have to match? Make it asymmetric. Make your electron beam even more energetic, say five hundred GeV, then you can make do with a thirty GeV positron beam.”
“Would that work.”
“It introduces some new challenges. The particle flying out from the collision point will be dominantly in one direction, so you would need a detector to account for that. But it could also bring some advantages.”
“This is the way to go,” said Sunny. “Ponies and dragons working together to build the next generation particle collider.”
“By the way,” said Hitch. “What are we going to do about Opaline?”
Im still puzzled about the radio frequency stuff given weve had optical plasmonic interactions since the 1970s? And stacks of benzene rings look nice as a starting point for a molecular hollow core accelerator?
Currently the best molecular insulator can reach 1.2 Gigavolt per meter linear field strength, through the material, but what interacting fields give an exponential cusp between the waveguide and the center beam? An inverse chirped wideband pulse through a nonlinear medium to create teh field strength?
The big problems with such gradients is when they approach the vaccuum breakdown limit and pair production starts to spew out of the region of maximum gradient.
Great if you actually want to mass produce antimatter. 
Ponies have RF wiggler fur, but dragons have optical grating scales and hard UV throat cilia?
5756782
how do you stack benzene rings in this way?
i mean real tidy stacking for this use, not pseudostacking
also who took my copy of the nineteenth edition of "Nanotechnology, a Practical Guide for the Singularity"? I want it back!
5756795
I always thought theyd use carbon or carbonyl links or something so that at least delocalised bonds were possible axially as well as radially?
three bonds beetween each sucessive ring, each sucessive set of links offset from the previous when doing triangular spaced links? That would allow extra molecular groups be added on the ouside for energy injection and molecular ajustment by direct conduction, ionic loading or such like?
For a simpler example, try Ferrocene
My Little Physicist: Friendship is High-energy Particle Beams.
(Very amused by Hitch anchoring this discussion back to the show. Maybe you guys can shoot Opaline with GeV-energy electron beams?)
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Shooting a narrow electron beam through a benzene ring should be possible - the pictures showing the ring structure were done with electron microscopy. But I don't think this would help to produce a high energy beam. And the beam width of high luminosity accelerators is much bigger ~ micrometres.
5756819
A wonder if a bucket of water over the head would be a better way to deal with a fire alicorn.
5756836
Could be! Are we hoping to melt her, extinguish her, or just make her wet and silly-looking? 🤔
That was my question!
5756819
"Can we please talk about extreme high energy particle physics, AFTER we deal with the magic stealing alicorn? I mean, dealing with the magic stealing alicorn who wants to end life as we know it is more important than figuring out how to make more Higgs particles and studying them for new physics."