Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should Scientists Build a New Particle Collider In Japan?
gbrumfiel writes "The world's most powerful particle collider ended an epic proton run yesterday morning, and researchers are already looking to the future. They want to build a 31-kilometer, multi-billion-dollar International Linear Collider (ILC) to study the recently-discovered Higgs boson in more detail and to look for new things as well. Japan has recently emerged as the front-runner to host the new collider. The Liberal Democratic Party, which won this weekend's elections, actually support the ILC in its party platform. But it's not yet clear whether real money will be forthcoming, or whether European and American physicists will back a Japanese bid. What do Slashdotters think? Does particle physics need a new collider? Should it go to Japan?"
World class universities and scientists, a willing government and easy access to the country for foreign nationals. What's not to like?
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Does a multi-billion 31 km long particle collider that must remain aligned belong in one of the seismically most active areas of the world?
This would make a perfectly reasonable news item; there's no need to solicit Slashdotters' opinions. People comment anyway.
99% of comments will be ill-informed. You won't be able to identify the 1% which are well informed, unless you're already knowledgeable on the subject. So why bother?
Just my 2 cents, but shouldn't the ILC be built on an area with a reduced earthquake risk?
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
We could feed *all* starving people with only the amount of food we waste.
As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
Sure it does! Political, geological and socioeconomic stability are prime factors in building one of these things. Why the SSC showed us that politics and economics will ruin your particle collider. So if Japan is better with their money than the US and has a geologically stable site and doesn't go to war with China in the near future, it's a good site.
Selecting a good site will increase your chances of it actually becoming infrastructure for the greater scientific community. Just ask Weinberg.
My work here is dung.
The ILC is a completely different design, with completely different goals. Previously, about 15 years ago, we had a hadron collider (the Tevatron) and a lepton collider (the LEP). The LEP was used as a basis to build the LHC; so now we have just hadron colliders (DESY is dual, but its energy range is way below the current frontier). A lepton collider gives us a way cleaner signal for weak and electromagnetic interactions, but gives us almost no insight on strong interactions; a hadron collider gives us a totally messy result, which includes a lot of strong interactions and noise-level channels for electroweak.In fact, at the LHC's energies, you see mostly gluon-gluon collisions, not even quark-quark. So, to actually see precisely the Higgs and measure its mass, a lepton collider would be great. A lepton collider would also give a clearer picture of wether there is something beyond the standard model (up to about half its center-of-mass collision energy at least), so al of us theoretical physicists would LOVE to have one.
However, accelerating electrons and positrons in a curved path is very, very, VERY hard. They lose their energy about a million times quicker than protons; so, to get to TeV levels, the collider should be linear. Accelerating stuff in a linear collider is very, very hard (note: "only" two "very"s here) because you need to give it its energy on a shorter space (while a conventional collider would do so over lots of cycles). So, its engineering won't be easy, but we will get a lot of insights on both particle physics and electromagnetism (to accelerate the damn electrons); that electromagnetism expertise could be used, for example, for high speed trains.
We absolutely should build a lepton linear collider. Whether it's in Japan or in the US (putting the Fermilab's infrastructure to good use), it will teach us a lot that the LHC can't.
When will people stop publishing news articles saying "the Higgs has been confirmed to exist"? This is driving me bat-shit insane. No, the Higgs has NOT necessarily been discovered. Particles have been observed in the LHC at energy levels that match the expected characteristics of the Higgs, but we DO NOT KNOW if it is the standard model Higgs or just something else that looks like it. Goddamn.
Read more: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342408/description/Higgs_hysteria
The ILC would be able to measure properties of the Higgs more accurately than the LHC, but before the LHC has ran at 13 or 14 TeV for a while we don't know if there's other interesting stuff to see.
If the LHC finds something new and the ILC has too low energy to produce it, it's wasted. Obviously those results would come long before the ILC is even close to finished, but it's important to keep options open until we know better. In addition there are other proposals for Higgs factories that would be cheaper to implement. Without new discoveries at the LHC the ILC may be pointless.
Another poster very ably picked apart your proposal that we use the Tevatron instead.
As for observing high energy atmospheric collisions, no, that won't work either. I've seen the detector at SLAC's linear accelerator. It's as big as an office building. It is truly an awesome sight.
You not only have to have high energy events happen, you have to have a very sophisticated detector built around where the event will happen in order to learn anything from it. Then, you probably need billions and billions of collisions, only some of which yield the reactions you're looking for, in order to get good enough statistics to have *any* certainty about what you've found.
As if that weren't enough, another characteristic of atmospheric collisions is that any high energy particle quickly generates a cascade, a shower, of lower energy particles. This creates quite a soupy mess and detangling the event you're looking for from this is just mind-blowingly difficult.
I do believe that it's already quite a challenging task to figure out what happened even in the relatively clean environment of the LHC. With the LHC comes a huge amount of supercomputing power and decades of code development. The LHC's page lists the Grid supercomputer they use as "the most powerful supercomputer in the world".
You may want to entertain the notion that perhaps using the LHC instead of trying to observe natural reactions is in fact the cheapest, fastest, and best way to do the physics desired.....
--PM
This is like a child who has not opened all of their Christmas presents and yet demands more. The Cern Collider is not even at maximum power yet. At least wait until a couple of years of using it at maximum power before deciding that we need a new one. How about the one that is on the international space station? I thought that there were collision from particles from super nova that were much more powerful than even the new Cern Collider. At least play with the toys you have now before asking for new ones.
As a scientist I have to say that we are the last people who should build something this large. For starters, our efforts are better spent doing science. Many of us are also old and out of shape. I suggest that, instead, we find some contractors to build it--they probably need the work more anyway. However, if it is decided that scientists should indeed build a collider, I want to be in charge of the hollering: "Shake it madam! Capital knockers!"
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Why not focus on the ultra high velocity particles coming in from space? In short, luminosity. The rate of collisions is so much lower and uncontrolled in terms of where the collisions happen that it's much more difficult to gather the bulk of data that is required to demonstrate statistical significance in the findings. Also, check out the pictures of the scale of the detectors installed at the LHC. They're positively enormous, and just as important to the performance of the facility as the power level of the beam line.
As for why they're asking now? It took 10 years to build the LHC. Assuming they start construction today on a new collider, they will still likely be looking at a period of time somewhere around a decade before the new system comes online. Also, the proposed accelerator is a linear accelerator, which offers a differently optimized set of tradeoffs compared to something like the LHC.
We did. The result of the thinking and design process was the ILC. Now we have thought for a bit and come to the conclusion that to examine our thinking we need an accelerator. The ILC has been on the drawing board for a long time now, we have known we would need it since before the LHC even began construction. Now don't get me wrong, I would love it if your idea was put into practice, I'm a theoretician. But basic research needs experiments, I cant do everything on my own and funding me to the exclusion of my experimental peers would be a waste of the taxpayers money I'm sorry to say.
Japan is currently planning to build a 500km/h maglev train line from Tokyo to Nagoya. At those speeds the track needs to be as straight as possible with few curves. This line will involve a lot of tunnelling as the proposed route runs down the mountainous spine of Honshu, Japan's main island.
Building the tunnel for a linear accelerator alongside a major part of the maglev line would be a nice twofer; all the tunneling gear and an experienced construction crew is to hand.