[SaberTail]

The "cold copper" accelerator technology is really neat, in my opinion. The way particle accelerators work is that they pump RF through waveguides into cavities, such that the electric field pushes on the electrons right as they enter the cavity. Historically, they've been built with geometry like cylinders and rectangles where the fields can be worked out analytically, and that can be fabricated easily. They're proposing using modern computational modeling techniques to design better cavity geometries that can then be fabricated with modern CNC techniques. That should allow more efficient accelerators and higher acceleration gradients.