Particle Accelerator Breakthrough

[grayson]

 

I believe I have come up with a particle accelerator breakthrough, and I need your help so I can know if it is practical or not. Before I start to talk about this idea, I must inform you not to steal it, and if you do, I have proof of it being stolen right here and will get you in legal trouble. Now that that is over, I will tell you, my idea.

Einstein got his well-deserved Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect. Now, quantum mechanics has gone off the rails with quark-gluon-plasma, quantum fluctuations, particle accelerators and much more. What if I told you I came up with a way to combine the photoelectric effect and particle accelerators together.

According to Electrodynamics, electrons have a certain force acting on them. Einstein thought that since photons had energy, they could help overcome this force, which ended up being the most accurate explanation for the photoelectric effect.

I thought this idea a while ago, and I have not seen any other people thinking of this idea. What if the photoelectric effect could be used in particle accelerators. See, energy causes particles to accelerate, and my thought was if an electron absorbed a photon, it could accelerate and have the function of a normal particle accelerator. I thought this idea was good because it would take less energy transformations.

Magnetic fields take a changing electric field, which takes energy (Unless it is permanent). And even if you have a magnetic field, you still need to change the direction of the poles, which takes more energy. After all of that, the magnetic force is still less energy efficient compared to other ways. In my Photon idea, all you have to do is make the electron absorb a photon, which happens naturally, and then it will accelerate. 

All I need to know is if this idea is practical, and if it would actually work. I also want to know if it already exists. Thank you for reading this, and do not patent it because I have proof right here that I created the idea (Unless somebody beat me).

[swansont]

1 hour ago, grayson said:

my thought was if an electron absorbed a photon, it could accelerate and have the function of a normal particle accelerator.

Free electrons can’t absorb photons; you can’t conserve both momentum and energy if that were to happen. They scatter photons, giving you a lower-energy photon. (Compton scattering)

You can absorb a photon in the photoelectric effect because the atom is there to let you conserve momentum.

But: acceleration of electrons with light has been done, in various ways

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55472-5

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/106

[grayson]

30 minutes ago, swansont said:

Free electrons can’t absorb photons; you can’t conserve both momentum and energy if that were to happen. They scatter photons, giving you a lower-energy photon. (Compton scattering)

You can absorb a photon in the photoelectric effect because the atom is there to let you conserve momentum.

But: acceleration of electrons with light has been done, in various ways

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-55472-5

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/106

+1 For helping me.

Have people thought about laser focusing X rays to accelerate the particles? I thought it would be a good idea because X rays can be easily synthesized, and they are energetic.