One thing you may know about particle physics experiments is that they're enormous. The Large Hadron Collider is five or so miles in diameter, big enough to circle some towns. Stanford's Linear Accelerator is two miles long. Scientists are hoping a new experiment will lead to far smaller but still extremely powerful accelerators.

Scientists at CERN ran some of the first tests at the AWAKE experiment yesterday, a new kind of accelerator based on a concept that might be able to cut the size of particle physics experiments down by a factor of a hundred or more.

Colliders like the Large Hadron Collider have lots of parts, but generally need a place to store particles, a place to speed them up to incredibly high speeds, a place to smash them together or against something else, and a place to look at all of the particle bits that came out of the resulting explosion.