International Linear Collider Design Ready To Go
Via El Reg comes news that the International Linear Collider's Technical Design Report is finished, leaving only funding in the way of construction. From the article: "A five volume report containing the plans for the International Linear Collider has been handed over to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) for approval. The Technical Design Report contains costings for the project, along with the design of the new collider. The new machine is significantly more powerful than the hoary European Large Hadron Collider and is likely to be sited in Japan, because the Pacific island nation has reportedly offered to pay for half of the construction costs. ... Jonathan Bagger, chair of the International Linear Collider Steering Committee, said the particle collider was 'ready to go.' 'The publication of the Technical Design Report represents a major accomplishment,' he continued. ... The ILC consists of two linear accelerators facing each other. "
A few years late, but hopefully not never.
Why build a super-expensive super-elaborate device, absolutely dependent on alignment and all that .. in a place where (1) land could hardly be less available or more expensive, (2) it tends to MOVE all the time (earthquakes, volcanoes, whatever), (3) it'll cost a bloody fortune for any visitors to visit.
Why not on some steppe somewhere, or a big flat desert (where there's at least sand for the concrete)?
Don't listen to the propaganda, this is the first of a large installation of spaceship-killing ion cannons which will ring the globe, protecting us from aliens.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Give us our copper back you morons.
The collision energies are ~10 % of LHC's. The benefit of a linear collider is that leptons like electrons and positrons can be used, making the analysis of the collisions simpler.
U+F8FF
The one issue I'd have with locating it in Japan is, of course, earthquakes. This is going to be *how* long... and the alignment is how many zeros to the right of the decimal point? All of which would suggest frequent shutdowns to re-align, and that's assuming no *major* earthquakes.
mark
...
That is pretty much the story of most things in my life that I wanted to do but couldn't.
Funding is generally the most important part, and when you leave it to last, it shows something about your management ability. Something about putting the cart before the horse comes to mind.
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Link on "handed over to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) for approval. " is http://slashdot.org/JonathanBagger,chairoftheInternationalLinearColliderSteeringCommittee,saidtheparticlecolliderwas Please fix.
The guy a few articles down who just finished the ATLAS detector in Lego bricks now has his new project.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The LHC was only ever proposed at CERN using the old LEP tunnel. The US had a proposal for the SSC which had a higher energy but lower luminosity (and so had effectively the same reach at the LHC). These were two entirely different machines. My understanding is that the SSC proposal sank because US politicians moved the location to Texas for political gain. Since Texas had none of the infrastructure that places like Fermilab had this essentially doubled the cost of the project and was partly the reason for it being cancelled...but I was still a grad student in Europe around that time so I had little direct knowledge of the politics.
However one of the fall outs from the cancellation is the reason why the ILC will not get built in the US. Too many physicists around the world got burnt by US political wrangling over which they had no input or control and their grant money quite literally ended up in the hole in the ground in Texas.
Just to be clear: the reason it's a linear collider and not circular is for synchrotron radiation losses.
The largest circular lepton collider was LEP (the Large Electron/Positron collider, formerly housed in the now-LHC tunnel) ran at 100GeV/beam. They lost about 2% of the beam energy every turn, which has to be replenished. If you tried to build a circular collider the same circumference as LEP, but run it at the ILC energy of 250GeV/beam, you'd lose about 30% of your energy on every turn. That's not sustainable.
You could argue that you can go to a bigger-diameter ring, but once you're above 30km circumference you'll have to dig more tunnel than for the ILC anyway, so you can't win. That's why it's a linear collider.
-Scientist on the ILC team
"Four score, and several international colliders ago...."
Abraham Lincoln, Extra-Dimensional Time-Traveler
It's necessary for them to stop the Kaiju
They just need to build a beam diverter that diverts the electron beam into undulators, and then they got a nice 20+ megawatt free electron laser ready to be aimed anywhere
C'mon, we all know the real reason why Japan wants it!
Godzilla is still wandering around the bottom of the pacific plotting his revenge against Tokyo.
When they build this thing they can subject a centipede to the high radioactive flux, creating MEGA-CENTI-PEDE!
Yes, One hundred million goddamn legs! With at least one hundred friggin' lasers attached to the head.
Take THAT Godzilla!