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International Super Collider Proposal
knightwolf writes: ""Particle Physicists Plan the Next Big Thing" - the New York Times online has an article describing the discussion around a new particle accelerator, including some commentary on the difficulties present in an international collaboration project. An interesting read - but it brings up other concerns - what about collaboration on other projects, such as software projects, internationally? Problems? Concerns? Major catastrophes?" Scientists fighting over a $6 billion expenditure - not a pretty sight.
You are right, there are a number of accelerators around the world. Here is a list of major accelerators with their corresponding experiments:
http://www.hep.net/experiments/all_sites.html
(Sorry, URLs don't work for me).
What is important to understand is that the overlap between the different experiments, even at the same accelerator, is very little. People do research an a myrid of physics at each site. In addition, accelerators around the world are constantly upgrading their hardware, software, and detectors to use at "capacity."
One of the reasons that scientists what a new accelerator built is because there are a number of areas of research that can only really be done with new equipment. While upgrading the old equipment does allow some of this new research, obviously someone (or someones) feel it would be better to build an accelerator with new hardware, software, and dectectors to conduct new research.
Sounds like a great idea to me, I mean if they can accellerate in such a small distance, then there's no worries about synchrotron radiation, etc. But then of course, you don't get all the synchrotron radiation to use with other studies.
I'm actually rather surprised there aren't more people investigating this, as this could possibly allow super-high energy colliders that aren't that big at all. I think the main problem is that there are so many unsolved issues with plasma physics (I am doing some research on plasma simulation myself) and there seem to be a lot of tech issues to overcome as well. I hope to see one of thse things built in my lifetime though.
Aren't there already too many particle accelerators in the world? Why don't we use those to capacity before building another one. I obviously don't know what I'm talking about, so correct me peoples...
It seems to me that as accelerators become more and more expensive, it might be more cost-effective to devote accelerator funding to researching other classes of accelerator, instead of building larger and larger synchrotons and other conventional accelerators.
I've been following the development of plasma accelerators with much interest. They have a much greater rate of acceleration of particles, which means that an accelerator of a given energy could be much smaller (and hence hopefuly cheaper) than a synchroton. A good paper discussing the merits and problems with current plasma accelerator designs is at http://www.indiana.edu/~icfa/icfa12/node24.html .
Other promising types of accelerator almost certainly exist also.
I'm not saying that synchrotons should be abandoned because they're bad; on the contrary, they work quite well. I'm arguing that it would be _cheaper_ to invest accelerator funding in developing new types of accelerator, as opposed to building ever-larger synchrotons.