More follow-up on an earlier report on the latest advancement on the plasma wakefield accelerator. The main players in this work were interviewed in this Stanford news report.
While this is certainly encouraging and a significant advancement in advanced acceleration techniques, the media needs to be tempered in trying to oversell this technique for the sake of selling newspapers with sensational headlines. The use of such technology does NOT depends only on the availability of high gradients. For particle physics and FEL applications, the QUALITY of the particle beam is very stringent. I've mentioned earlier of two factors - energy spread and emittance - which could easily be the showstoppers for ANY acceleration mechanism.
We should not try to oversell any part of science. We have seen what has happened to String Theory, especially after Brian Greene's Elegant Universe TV series and the backlash against String Theory. Our communication to the public especially should not give false expectations, and certainly not with promises that we may never be able to fulfill.
Zz.
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