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International Linear Collider Design Ready To Go

Posted by Unknown on from the better-atom-smashing-through-science dept.

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.

18 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. In Japan?! by Toad-san · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)?

    1. Re:In Japan?! by paiute · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Those are all good reasons, but they will build it in your backyard behind the shed if you pay half of the cost.

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    2. Re:In Japan?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Reminds me of how the LHC was supposed to be built in the US.. Then some politicians smelled pork, and fought over the location with complete disregard to the needs of the project until it became such a clustefuck the project was moved to Europe.

      Progress delayed, scientific achievement and prestige denied to US academics.. All because some people wanted their pockets lined.

    3. Re:In Japan?! by loufoque · · Score: 4, Informative

      Japan is paying for half the fees because having it there would be beneficial to them for obvious reasons.
      Their government is willing to invest great quantities of money to bolster up their physics research sector.

      Those devices are built deep underground, so there is no need to purchase that much land and effects of tectonic activity are minimal.

    4. Re:In Japan?! by interval1066 · · Score: 2

      so there is no need to purchase that much land

      Buying ANY land in Japan is very expensive and building things underground doesn't save you from siesmic activity, it may infact magnify it in some circumtances.

      --
      Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
    5. Re:In Japan?! by the+gnat · · Score: 4, Informative

      You seriously think the academics were more concerned about prestige than lined pockets?

      You haven't met many academic scientists, have you? A long-term job at a major research institution pays enough for a comfortable, secure, upper-middle-class 1st-world lifestyle (and equally comfortable retirement), and most scientists are entirely content with that as long as their job description basically involves geeking out over obscure theory for days on end. If they wanted to line their pockets there are far better ways to do this - the people who really care about money figure out very early that staying in academia is not the most efficient way to get rich. (One of the scientists who used to work on the project I'm on ended up at Goldman Sachs.) But some academics will do pretty nearly anything short of murder for a Nobel prize if they smell an opportunity.

    6. Re:In Japan?! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      The Japanese have become pretty good at building stuff that is earthquake proof. I was in Tokyo when the 11/3 quake hit and there was really very little damage to buildings.

      The problem with Fukushima was that it takes a long, long time for a reactor to shut down and the earthquake damaged the cooling system even before the tsunami got there. With a particle accelerator it shuts down pretty much instantly, and earthquakes take time to build up so in reality you have a few seconds for the auto-stop system to kick in. Look at it another way, their high speed trains have never had a single major accident despite zooming around at 300kph since the early 60s.

      --
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    7. Re:In Japan?! by jbengt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That was to be the SSC, not the LHC, and the "politicians who smelled pork" was mainly Bush 1, who got it started in Texas in spite of the fact that if they built it at Fermilab a significant portion of the infrastructure would have already been in place.

    8. Re:In Japan?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've seen coworkers eventually bail from academia for greener pastures in terms of money, whether because they got tired of that particular ladder, or tired of the politics, or a change in priorities related to money. A few went into finance, some making a huge amount of money, and some not so much. But a lot of it was much more boring than that, and were able to go into industry jobs, sometimes only vaguely related to their research experience, and get free training and starting pay at least twice what they were paid in academia. The biggest complaint from those that leave that I've kept in touch with is that it is really boring. If money becomes a top priority, there are plenty of places to bail from academia to, at least in the sciences and engineering fields.

    9. Re:In Japan?! by loufoque · · Score: 2

      RTFS

      the Pacific island nation has reportedly offered to pay for half of the construction costs

      protip: the "Pacific island nation" refers to Japan.

    10. Re:In Japan?! by JanneM · · Score: 2

      Plenty of land is available and inexpensive. Most of Japan is uninhabited. It's the land in _cities_ that is hugely expensive.

      And any place will cost a fortune for visitors to visit.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
  2. Not more powerful than LHC by amazeofdeath · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Not more powerful than LHC by jfengel · · Score: 2

      IANAP, but the Wiki article on linacs sez that the advantage of a linear accelerator is that you can use bigger, heavier ions since there's no need to continually accelerate them just to keep them in a circle. That energy is sometimes given off as synchrotron radiation, which would be wasted.

      Another bonus: now that we know where to looking for the Higgs, we can make it for a lot less energy. The LHC needed extra power to make the Higgs in particular ways that left an easily-noticeable signal (in particle physics terms). Now that we know what to look for, we can produce more Higgs bosons for less energy, and make better measurements.

    2. Re:Not more powerful than LHC by Warbothong · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      The LHC's predecessor was the "Large Electron Positron" collider, so that's not a particular reason to use a linear accelerator.

      Lepton accelerators do have an advantage over baryon colliders in that leptons are (as far as we can tell) indivisible; if you smash two leptons together with X amount of energy each, you get a collision of energy 2X. With baryons, the energy of each is mostly divided up between their three constituent quarks. Colliding two baryons usually results in a collision between one quark from each, so your collisions only use about 1/3 of the energy that was put in.

  3. Re:Relevant comment here... by PiMuNu · · Score: 3, Informative

    The JPARC (H- ion) linac actually has a 50 cm kink following the recent earthquake. It still works! That's why we install trim magnets...

  4. SSC not LHC! by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Relevant comment here... by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

    The JPARC beam is a quite a bit lower in energy than the ILC and the accuracy tolerance is far, far larger than the ILC will require for collisions. Also the beam line will be packed with accelerator cavities, not bending magnets, and taking out those cavities to add magnets to go around a kink will reduce the beam energy - and not just by the lack of cavities but also by the synchrotron. None of this is really important for a proton accelerator.

    Japan is far from the ideal place to construct such a machine but, as usual, it is the politics of funding it that will drive where it is constructed.

  6. Why it's linear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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