Italy is 'souping up' particle physics in a bid to get the biggest bang-for-buck accelerator in the world.
Pantaleo Raimondi of the National Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN) has found a way to rev up conventional accelerators, making them ten times more 'luminous', as tech jargon has it.
''Our Daphne machine is churning out dozens more particles on the same feed and we're seeing a huge increase in the number of collisions,'' the researcher said.
Raimondi said that after modifying 50% of the accelerator, ''the luminosity immediately rose by a factor of 1.5 and that's just the start''.
INFN President Roberto Petronzio said there was ''a lot of interest around the world in what we're doing''.
He said the results achieved with Daphne would be used to build an accelerator 'factory' whose luminosity would be ''100 times greater than the only two such machines in the world''.
This B Factory would lead to the construction of the world's most powerful laser, able to ''make a vital contribution to genetic and medical research,'' he said.
