Shrinking particle accelerators with cold plasma and a large picnic basket

Twenty-five feet below ground, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory scientist Spencer Gessner opens a large metal picnic basket. This is not your typical picnic basket filled with cheese, bread and fruit—it contains screws, bolts, steel tubing, and many other parts and pieces that carry particles to nearly the speed of light. The components are arranged precisely to do an important job: help feed bunches of fast-moving electrons into the stuff that the sun is made of: plasma.