Boulder, Colorado – November 19, 2015:

An international collaboration, led by Stanford University, and including Tech-X Corporation as a partner, has been awarded $13.5 million by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to take an innovative particle accelerator design dubbed the “accelerator-on-a-chip” and make it into a fully functional and scalable working prototype. This laser-driven particle accelerator could have a major impact on the physics community and science in general by providing new particle and photon sources that are less expensive to build, address current infrastructure challenges, and provide broader access to the scientific community.

Tech-X will participate in computational research for the project, simulating prototype devices and helping to interpret experimental results. To do so, Tech-X and other collaborators on the project will use VSim, a high-performance, flexible electromagnetic and particle physics software application. “Particle accelerators are some of the most complex devices ever built,” said Dr. Benjamin Cowan, a Tech-X Senior Research Scientist who will be leading the Tech-X effort on the project. “Simulations are especially critical to this research, since the devices are 100,000 times smaller than conventional accelerators.” By using VSim software, researchers will be able to tackle the most complicated problems, since VSim is able to run on thousands of processors at the nation’s largest computing facilities.

Tech-X was involved in earlier research in this area, which led to a publication in Nature in 2013. As part of this new effort, Tech-X will be working with world-renowned experts in accelerator physics, laser physics, nanophotonics and nanofabrication.