Particle accelerators are usually huge structures—think of the 3.2-km-long SLAC National Accelerator Lab in Stanford, California. But scientists have been hard at work trying to shrink these accelerators down by using lasers to perform the accelerating. These particle accelerators would be the size of single room, and cost much less as well. Now, a startup says its laser-powered accelerator, the first commercial version of such a device, has successfully accelerated a beam of electrons. These could first see use in radiation tests of electronics designed for satellites and spacecraft.The concept behind the new device was first detailed in 1979. An extremely powerful and ultra-short laser pulse strikes a gas, producing a plasma. The plasma oscillates in the laser’s wake, and electrons get dragged along in the plasma’s path, accelerating them to relativistic speeds. These “wakefield accelerators“ can generate acceleration fields up to 1,000 times greater than what conventional particle colliders are capable of. Scientists have long suggested that wakefield accelerators could shrink kilometer-scale facilities to room-size or smaller.“Democratization is the name of the game for us,” says Björn Manuel Hegelich, founder and CEO of TAU Systems in Austin, Texas. “We want to get these incredible tools into the hands of the best and brightest and let them do their magic.”TAU has now successfully generated electron beams using its commercial laser-powered wakefield accelerator. “Laser-powered accelerators have been around in academic labs for more than 20 years,” Hegelich says. “What’s most exciting is that until now, they haven’t been available as tools for industry. This result is a major step to change that paradigm and make compact accelerators useful for the world outside of academia.”The new accelerator uses a laser supplied by the Thales Group in France, which TAU notes displays exceptional stability. “The goal here is to focus on reliability and reproducibility rather than record performance,” Hegelich says.The first units for customers will fit in a single room. “For the future, our aim is to reduce the laser to a large cabinet size,” Hegelich says.TAU’s first commercial accelerator will be deployed at the startup’s facility in Carlsbad, California, which will operate as a showroom for customers to become familiar with the technology. TAU plans to offer use of their accelerator to commercial and government customers starting in 2026.“This first commercial system will operate in the range of 60 to 100 million electron volt (MeV) at 100 Hz with capacity to upgrade to higher energies in the future,” Hegelich says. “We’re not rushing to the highest energies yet because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the 100 to 1,000 MeV range, where conventional accelerators are too large to be of practical use.” For comparison, the linear accelerator at SLAC can achieve electron energies up to 50 GeV. How to use a room-sized particle accelerator At 60 to 100 MeV, which requires a laser system with about 200 millijoules of pulse energy, the accelerator will find use in radiation tests of space-bound electronics. “There is a five to 10 times supply-demand gap for the most demanding types of testing that this technology can immediately help address,” Hegelich says. “We believe the space industry is going to play an increasingly important role in the world economy, and solving this [radiation testing] problem will significantly accelerate the industry’s growth potential.”After that, TAU plans is to increase the laser energy to about 1 joule, bringing the electron beam energy into the 100 to 300 MeV range, Hegelich says. This will allow radiation testing of thicker devices, as well as unlock high-precision, high-throughput medical imaging and “radiation therapy that’s competitive with the best proton therapy at a fraction of the cost.”The 100 to 300 MeV range will also enable imaging of advanced 3-D microchips. “Advanced chips are the hardware underlying artificial intelligence,” Hegelich says. “AI has become extremely important to the world economy, and there’s no indication that the trend will level off any time soon. We want to accelerate the design and manufacturing cycle to help the industry keep up with its ambitions.”Current state-of-the-art tools for such imaging “currently take hours for high-resolution failure analysis to inform the manufacturing process, while our next-generation sources will be bright enough to take the necessary measurements in minutes or less,” Hegelich says.A next-generation multi-joule laser could help generate electron beam energies in the 300 to 1,000 MeV range. This could drive an X-ray free electron laser, “the brightest terrestrial sources of X-rays ever devised,” Hegelich says. These could find use in next-generation X-ray lithography “to push Moore’s Law to its fundamental limit. There’s been a lot of buzz around this topic lately, and every proposed solution requires a particle accelerator to make it happen. Our accelerators are small enough to make such proposals economically viable without the need to reinvent the modern chip fab.”Such a powerful accelerator could also find use in fundamental science. “Campus-sized accelerators and light sources have been used as tools for some of the most cutting-edge scientific research and engineering for almost 100 years, unravelling new insights into the fundamental nature of energy and matter, chemistry, biology, and materials science,” Hegelich says. “The problem is that there are so few of them because of their size and cost. Our technology shrinks down campus-sized accelerators and light sources to room-sized or smaller. Imagine how much more we will learn as these tools become ubiquitous.”The new accelerator will cost $10 million and up, depending on the application and feature set. “Much of the manufacturing cost is in the ultrahigh intensity laser that powers the accelerator,” Hegelich says. “These lasers are still scientific systems in their infancy, so there is a significant opportunity to reduce the cost and footprint as they mature.”