Project eyes particle accelerator in a shoe box with Gordon Moore grant

Scientists in Silicon Valley and Germany have kicked off a five-year project to create a particle accelerator that's the size of a shoebox -- a project that, if successful, could revolutionize scientific and medical research.

Particle accelerators have been an important tool for fundamental physics research for decades, but they are costly, complex and long. Their job is to accelerate charged particles to high energy levels and the higher the energy required, the longer the accelerator needs to be.

The accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California, is about three kilometers and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, used to discover the Higgs Boson particle, is a 27-kilometer loop.

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