Particle accelerators: Small really is beautiful (opens in new tab)

From the Economist article: "Dr Byer did still rely on an old-school accelerator to feed moderately high-speed electrons into his device in the first place. But lasers could do that job too, as the German team, led by Peter Hommelhoff, of the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen, and John Breuer, from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, demonstrate in a second paper, just published in Physical Review Letters."

Take into account, though, that accelerating electrons into near light speeds is not too difficult anyway. They are thousands of times lighter than protons, for instance, which is what the LHC works with most of the time.

I don't believe that this is a major problem for the technology. I can imagine that the level of flux (amount of electrons coming through the device and being accelerated) is rather low at the moment however.