The SSC in a basement?

Factual Questions
1

Several years back when the government was yanking the funding from the Superconducting Super Collider (A mistake in my opinion, the teeming millions could have learned a lot), I heard a story about a physicist who had built a particle accelerator in his basement (or somewhere similar) that could impart roughly the same energy (20 TeV). I remember the price tag being on the order of ten million dollars (compared to 8 billion for the SSC).

As I remember, the technology he use involved pushing the particles using the wavefronts of a laser, and not magnets like most particle accelerators. The technology wasn’t perfect in the sense that he wasn’t able to steer or control the particles well enough to collide them with each other.

Anybody know the straight dope on this? Is it possible to build a working particle collider in a basement?

2

It sounds bogus.

Where would he get the $10,000,000?

If he can’t collide the particles, then it is not a “super collider”.

3

The cool thing about the SSC was that it could generate such large energies, more by a couple orders of magnitude than any other particle accelerator in the world. This guy’s PA could generate the same energies but he was still working on the details.

As I recall, the guy was one of the major critics (or was used by the critics) of the funding. “Look congress, I can build on that does roughly the same thing, it has a few bugs but I’ve spent only 1/10th of 1 percent of the money you’ve spent”