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The Next Big Particle Accelerator

Posted by Hemos on from the the-next-great-thing dept.

Guinnessy writes "This year more than a thousand physicists gathered for three weeks at Snowmass Village, in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen, to talk about the future of particle physics in the US. Physics Today has a report on the meeting which says that the community should build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. That's powerful enough to make mini black holes."

6 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bad Things by Chocky2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    There wouldn't be a problem, black holes that small would evaporate so quickly as to never be any risk. Plus it would be virtually impossible to accidently create one in the process of doing other things. And besides, cosmic rays of several hundred GeV smack into our atmosphere every day.

  2. No black holes here. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nowhere in the article does it mention creating mini-black-holes. The purpose is to try to create Higgs bosons and to precisely measure their characteristics to get a better handle on how electroweak symmetry breaking works.

    To create mini-black-holes, you'd need a Planck-energy accelerator. This is beyond our current ability to build, and will remain so for quite a while. Scientific American had an article many years ago about what you'd have to do to build a conventional linac that powerful; it ended up having to be constructed in space and taking 2% of the sun's power output to run.

    On a more mundane scale, we have experimental evidence (from cosmic rays of the same energy) that nothing catastrophically bad happens in collisions at energies of up to about 1.0e30 eV. We're not going to produce energies this high for a very long time either (current accellerators get in the 1.0e13 range at most; that's 100,000,000,000,000,000 times too low to be a concern).

  3. Re:Because... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It's not very likely that this accelerator will help us test quantum gravity. Quantum gravity scales are many orders of magnitude beyond our largest accelerators, which are themselves more powerful than the one being proposed. Accelerator physics isn't likely to do anything for quantum gravity, unless particular hypothetical large-extra-dimension proposals happen to be right.

  4. Re:Bad Things by dragons_flight · · Score: 4, Informative

    See this story.

    The main reassurance we have is that cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere do get to highly energies than we've ever created. Hence if those energies can create mini black holes, then it must happen naturally in the upper atmosphere. Mini black holes from the upper atmosphere have yet to the destroy the Earth, so there is good reason to believe that nothing created in the accelerator will either.

  5. Re:500 GeV is nothin' by dragons_flight · · Score: 4, Informative

    Incidently, I was told that if Fermilab loses confinement on their Tevatron beam, it hits the ring with the force of a big rig hitting a wall. Hopefully the lost beam is distributed over a large enough section not to cause serious damage, but even then you get to hear an audible "WWHHuuuummmpp". The idea that a bunch of particles can get themselves heard is a little frightening when you think about it.

  6. No mini black holes! by rimdo · · Score: 2, Informative
    From The Pierre Auger Project:
    In the 1960's, a ground array of 19 detectors spread over 8 square kilometers was built at Volcano Ranch, New Mexico, by a team led by John Linsley. In 1963, his team reported an observation of a cosmic ray with an energy greater than 10^20 eV. Since then, several large detector arrays have been built to search for very high energy csomic rays. One such detector, called the Fly's Eye, and built in the Utah desert, observed a cosmic ray shower in 1991 that at its maximum contained 200 billion particles in the shower. The energy of the primary particle was 3 x 10^20 eV, the highest energy cosmic ray ever observed. While the composition of the primary particle isn't known with certain, the best guess is that it was a moderate mass nucleus (something like oxygen).
    If mini black holes can be created with collisions on the order of 5*10^11eV(=500GeV), then these cosmic rays should have produced mini black holes. There is no evidence that these much more energetic cosmic ray showers created a black hole, so I think we can safely say that mini black holes either are not produced by subatomic particles or that they have no noticable effect on normal matter.