Accelerating the fight against cancer

As charged-particle therapies grow in popularity, physicists are working with other experts to make them smaller, cheaper and more effective—and more available to cancer patients in the United States. Once physicists started accelerating particles to high energies in the 1930s, it didn’t take them long to think of a killer app for this new technology: zapping tumors. Standard radiation treatments, which had already been around for decades, send X-rays straight through the tumor and out the o...