When federal officials selected Texas over Illinois as the site
for the new $6 billion supercollider physics machine, it was a
body blow to Chicago area hopes for continuing to lead this
high-tech field into the next century. But it wasn`t a knockout
punch. Research at Argonne National Laboratory suggests it may
be possible to produce a new generation of particle accelerators
that are more innovative and more powerful, yet smaller and much
cheaper to make, than the supercollider or any other accelerator
based on existing technology. Work led by Argonne scientist
James Simpson indicates that a new approach to accelerating
subatomic particles could provide scientists with the tools they
need to explore how matter is put together, without building
more gigantic machines like the supercollider, which is designed
as a ring 53 miles around. The approach used by Simpson and his
colleagues employs the ``wake-field`` method of accelerating
streams of electrons, using a radically different approach to
feeding energy in