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The Next Big Particle Accelerator
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."
So they build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. The next you know Michael Jackson will buy one to sleep in because it makes him younger.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I doubted that the current Congress would've approved something like this to begin with. With the current state of economy, and the fact that eventually we'll have to clean up the giant mess that the recent anti-terrorism and airline support bills have made of our budget, the outlook is grim.
Remember that the congress who killed (and then buried) SCSC was a Democratic Congress. I had the opportunity to speak to a physicist in '93 who actually attended the hearings. His take on the whole deal was that the D's were pretty openly 'punishing' Texas for voting Republican in '92 by yanking all its 'pork-barrel' projects.
There was never a cost/benifit analysis or any mention of science. It was all politics and greed.
The SCSC development pumped millions into both Lubbock and Amarillo economies. It took quite a while for both those economies to recover from its burial... and it was literally buried. They filled in the trenches dug for the contstruction so that it could not easily be ressurected. While I think Clinton was a fairly decent president in terms of job performance, he rubberstamped this one. This kind of behavior got the D's very firmly ejected from both Senate and House in '94.
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It is much like the study of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, this study lead to nothing but a better understanding of quantum phenomenon. BUT, examing this came many applications: Lasers(espicially the diode laser, the pen laser) solid-state electronics (computers), fission (power reactors) and numerous others. Yes, some super-weapon was developed from this that could/can destroy the world, but more good was done for society (industrial western) than harm.
On the subject of costs, $5billion is a lot of money for an individual, but this much divided amoung participating countries over 5-10 years construction time is a drop in the bucket of any countries budget. Hell, one stealth bomber costs on the order of $5 billion.
Actually, there is a fashionable idea in particle physics these days which goes by the name of "large extra dimensions" (large compared to the ordinary Planck length), which would bring the Planck scale, where you could expect to create mini black holes, down a lot (depending on the number of extra dimensions, geometry of spacetime in these additional dimensions, etc.) Lots of free parameters, by which you can get anything you like, much like in string theory ;-)
;-) ) particles but identification and precision measurements are hard because hadron colliders are very messy (lots of unwanted particles created along the way, giving huge background to whatever you want to look at). This is because of the more complicated laws of physics of hadrons compared to leptons (electrons or muons).
...) at the LHC in fact.
Anyway, in these scenarios you do expect black hole creation a the next linear collider, or in fact even at the LHC, currently under construction at CERN.
Also, very briefly the way experimental particle physics has worked over the last decades is to build proton and electron (possibly muon in the future) colliders alternatingly.
With hadron (proton) colliders such as the LHC you get high energies more easily because of less synchroton radiation (charges being accelerated, including going around a curve, radiate away a lot of their energy, increasing the power you need to operate the machine. This radiation is less if the particles are heavier, as is the case for hadrons). This way you create expected (and unexpected
People hope to find "the" (i.e. standard model) Higgs boson or something more unexpected (supersymmetry, mini black holes,
Then after some time when engineering has made enough progress to bring leptons up to comparable energies, you can do precision tests on whatever you have found already. Here it can be useful to have some data available from the hadron machine.
Anyway, you need both if you want to be sure about the laws of physics.
The question for the US IMO is if it wants to have world class particle physics in the future. Currently the strongest hadron collider in the world is at Fermilab in Chicago. This will be made obsolete (for direct fundamental particle searches) by the LHC, which is in Europe.
If the US fails again to build a world class machine, it will be built somewhere else in the world (Europe or Japan) and US experimental particle physics will be between in-trouble and non-existent for decades.
(I say this as a particle physicist in Europe.)
On the question why it fundamental physics should be done - as far as technology is concerned, there are sometimes spin-offs in the short run (such as the WWW, developed at CERN), and revolutions in the long or very long run (e.g. all semiconductor technology would be unthinkable without basic research in quantum mechanics in the first decades of the 20th century). Maybe it will happen again. Nobody can tell. Also, it's culture and it's fun. Taxpayer decides if this is interesting enough.
Yes, this is a problem with hadron colliders.
If the SPS confinement is lost, the beam will drill a hole through the machine. This has happened, when a lightning strike tripped the power.
The LHC requires a special beam dump, because if the beam is lost it will deposit enough energy that it will literally blow up the machine where it hits. It won't rupture the tunnel or anything, but it will cause quite a mess.
I saw some of the early work on the SSC emergency beam dump. The problem is that you have to turn on the deflection magnet very rapidly (and properly sync'd with the particle bunches), so that one bunch goes entirely down the "normal" beamline, and the next gets entirely deflected down the dump. You do not want any particles to be in the way when the magnet is partially on: they'd bend only partway, and slam into the throat of the "wye" between the lines.
You also have to tie the trigger into the safety systems, so if anything trips -- RF, loss of power, magnet quench, whatever -- the beam is automatically dumped before it's lost.
Leptons are less of a problem. If the LEP beam was lost, it would just harmlessly slam into the beampipe wall. Well, mostly harmless: it'd create a shower of "noise" particles, which if it happened in the wrong spot, might go into one of the experiments. This might damage some of the more sensitive electronics, crystals, or whatnot. I think Aleph claimed this happened once.
But note that what they were talking about at Snowmass is a linear collider: no circulating beams. So just stop injection, and you're set. I suppose there might be some benefit to a last-minute dump to protect the detector, but it'll have to be triggered from the detector site itself.. remember the beam is essentially travelling at the speed of light! No upstream alarm signal will get there in time.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
Anyway, the Next Linear Collider (NLC) is very important for many reasons. Here are a few.
If you live in the US please contact your congressmen and tell them that you support the creation of the NLC.
If you are in Europe, especially Germany, please contact your representatives and tell them that you support Tesla (the competing design for the NLC, the European design).
If you live in Japan, either NLC or Tesla.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person