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German Lab to Host International Linear Collider
jabberjaw writes "Physicsweb is reporting that Germany's DESY lab has been chosen as the host of the International Linear Collider. Built at an estimated $5bn the ILC will utilizes supeconducting cavities operating at 2 Kelvin rather then the more conventional X-Band accelerators outlined by the US team at Stanford and the Japanese team at KEK. After the ILC's expected completion in 2010 the 30km long lab will have the ability to accelerate electrons and positrons at energies up to 1 TeV."
The Higgs Boson is a critical part of Quantum Mechanics--if the entire mass range is searched (which, while LHC isn't searching all of it, many future colliders will finish the range), and the boson is not found, the basic foundation of quantum mechanics will have to be questioned, as the way that the theorists made the theory work originally was to introduce the hypothetical Higgs field. This solved the mathematical inconsistancies and made the theory work. But if the boson isn't found...
One thing people forget about the Higgs boson is that it doesn't necessarily need to be there, at least not in its usually-understood form. In the electroweak theory, there is a symmetry of nature which makes the electromagnetic and weak forces look the same at high energies (i.e. in the early universe when things were very hot). At low energies, this symmetry is "broken", and so the two forces look different. Its sort of like a ball perched at the top of a perfectly symmetrical hill - when the ball stays on top the situation has a lot of symmetry, but the symmetry is gone when the ball randomly chooses one side to roll down. The predictions of this theory have been stunningly successful (it led to a Nobel Prize in the 1970s). In this theory, the Higgs boson and its associated interactions control the way in which this symmetry is broken - it controls the shape of the "hill".
However, all the theory really says is that this symmetry exists and that something breaks it - there's no guarantee that it's a single new particle (Higgs boson) that does the job. There may be several Higgs particles, or even some entirely new physics that breaks this symmetry, and all the experimentally-verified parts still work. The usual idea of a single Higgs boson is only the simplest case.
Even though we don't know what form this new physics will take, there are pretty good (though far from airtight) arguments that say that whatever it is has to happen at energies below about 1 TeV. The idea is that if the "natural" energy of electroweak physics is a billion TeV, say, then it would be very strange for the energy scale of the weak force to be at 0.1 TeV (which it is) - a bunch of really big numbers need to almost cancel, but not quite, in order to get that kind of discrepancy. Physicists are thus fairly convinced that either (1) there is a Higgs boson in this energy range, and so the LHC will find it, or (2) something else even more interesting happens in this energy range, and so the LHC will find that. This is, of course, not a sure thing by any means.