A cooperative agreement with Palo-Alto based CPI opens the door to routine commercial manufacturing of these powerful vacuum tube devices, which convert electron beams into microwaves that are used to accelerate subatomic particles.

In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.

In 1971, physicist Burton Richter of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was building a new type of particle collider called a storage ring.