For the first time, scientists have accelerated electrons in a plasma wave

Desk Report: For the first time, scientists have figured out how to accelerate electrons using protons passing through plasma.
That’s a big deal, because it could lead to much smaller and cheaper particle accelerators than the ones we currently rely on.Right now, if you want to install a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in your back garden, you need a concrete tunnel about 27 kilometres (nearly 17 miles) long and US$5 billion in spare change.But this new experiment uses something known as plasma wakefield acceleration – and it takes up just 10 metres or 33 feet of space.
The team behind the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment (AWAKE) at CERN in Geneva has been working for five years to get a result like this, and while it’s still early stages, this could end up driving a huge improvement in the way we examine the fundamental physics of the world.”The results shown here are a significant step towards the development of future high-energy particle accelerators,” say the researchers.
What happens in existing particle accelerators, like the LHC, is that oscillating electric fields work inside contained vacuums called cavities, creating two opposing charged zones that excite particle beams up to high-energy levels.
These particles can then be smashed together and studied in detail to examine particles at the subatomic level. A long series of cavities are required though, hence the 27-kilometre (17-mile) stretch that makes up the Large Hadron Collider.