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?"
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.
Earthquakes...tsunamis....
Giant lizards... overgrown moths... Hello kitty... The list goes on.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...and 87% of all statistics are made up...
Citation needed. Every time somebody quotes that, the percentage is different.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.