The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced a $13.5 million grant to Stanford University to create a fully functional and scalable prototype of a particle accelerator design dubbed the "accelerator-on-a-chip."

The grant will support an effort by Stanford and its partners to demonstrate a working prototype of an accelerator based on experiments published in 2013 by the project's principal investigators, Dr. Robert Byer of Stanford and Dr. Peter Hommelhoff of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. The laser-driven accelerator could have a major impact on the physics community by providing new particle and photon sources that are less expensive to build, address current infrastructure challenges, and boost access to accelerators for the scientific community.

"Based on our proposed revolutionary design, this prototype could set the stage for a new generation of 'tabletop' accelerators, with unanticipated discoveries in biology and materials science and potential applications in security scanning, medical therapy, and x-ray imaging," said Byer.

The project will bring together experts in accelerator physics, laser physics, nanophotonics, and nanofabrication in an international effort to develop a functional, scalable prototype accelerator within five years. If they succeed, the project could lead to electron and x-ray sources that are orders of magnitude smaller than current particle accelerators. In addition to Byer and Hommelhoff, the collaboration includes teams at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California; Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany; the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland; and researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles; Purdue University; the University of Hamburg; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; Technical University of Darmstadt; and Tech-X Corporation.