Physicists Plan to Build a Bigger LHC

ananyo writes "When Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, particle physicists would not have dreamt of asking for something bigger until they got their US$5-billion machine to work. But with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC has fulfilled its original promise — and physicists are beginning to get excited about designing a machine that might one day succeed it: the Very Large Hadron Collider. The giant machine would dwarf all of its predecessors (see 'Lord of the rings'). It would collide protons at energies around 100 TeV, compared with the planned 14TeV of the LHC at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. And it would require a tunnel 80-100 kilometres around, compared with the LHC's 27-km circumference. For the past decade or so, there has been little research money available worldwide to develop the concept. But this summer, at the Snowmass meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota — where hundreds of particle physicists assembled to dream up machines for their field's long-term future — the VLHC concept stood out as a favorite."

Comments

Dallas?

[alexander_686]

hmmm....I wonder where they could build it. Oh - I know. Dallas. The tunnel has been dug so all they have to do is drop in a few magnates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

On a more serious note, I though the next big project was going to be a linear accelerator. Anybody know why they picked the round one over the straight one?

Peanuts

[Alain Williams]

A cost of $10 billion is peanuts compared to the $3.2-4 trillion cost of the Iraq war or the $12.8 trillion cost of the bank bailout.. Even if these figures are not very accurate, VLHC is, comparatively, not expensive.

The trouble is that VLHC does not enrich the friends of the politicans and so will not be looked on favourably. When will mankind grow up?

Re:Peanuts

[TopherC]

I don't think in these cases you have multiple labs bidding for the job. You have multiple countries wanting to host the lab, but that's a different story.

The biggest problem for high energy physics is establishing multi-year funding. The US government cannot promise anything beyond a single year of funding. If say $8 B has been spent over 10 years and one year congress says "but I promised to cut spending", then that's the end of the road for that lab. This happened for the SSC in 1993, but also a lot of times since then on lower-profile, some $500 M experiments that were, yes, in construction already.

Now say 15 years later the $10B has been spent, but its not quite done, another $2B would let you finish the project. Do you really throw away $10B to save 2B? There is no fraud, just a mis-estimation of the costs of building a beyond state-of-the-art machine and slightly larger technical problems than were expected.

Most of the cases I'm familiar with, including the SSC, were not actually budget overruns even though they were politicized that way. If you're a politician who wants to (a) publicly demonstrate how fiscally conservative you are and (b) not actually cut spending on items that might affect the bulk of your constituency, then you cut big science every time. Even if the budget grows on the whole, you've made a statement and some headlines.

Why?

[pla]

Make no mistake, I don't mean my subject as anti-science - From my point of view, I'd gladly give one of these to every university in the world before I'd pay for one more bullet fired from one more drone to kill one more Arab in a desert far away.

But in planning for a future desired collision energy, they really should have some actual goal in mind to justify that design. Do they hope to find dark matter? Black holes? Do they actually think they can make the Higgs break down into something else at that energy? So... Why?

You need another one? So soon?

[bobbied]

You pesky physicists just keep running around in circles asking for more, MORE MORE money.. Is all this really necessary or are we really just funding a pile of PHD student's research?

So, why don't we just cut to the chase here and go with the biggest possible? I'm starting to get tired of this "We need a bigger one now!" thing.

Seriously, So now that they've managed to find the Higgs boson we are done with the LHC? I'm looking for a really good reason we need a bigger collider here and I'm not seeing any given. Is there some theory we need to test or some additional advances in technology which depend on a better understanding of subatomic physics at such large energies? I'm no physicist, but I'm not seeing a reason for this expense, other than having a new, bigger and more expensive shiny toy.

Help us out, what will 100 TeV get you that your 14 TeV won't?

Re:WHY NOT IN THE FIRST PLACE !!

[TopherC]

I also wanted to mention the failed SSC in Texas, cancelled in 1993. That would have been running at double the LHC's energy about a decade earlier. In 1993 congress seats were won by senators promising budget cuts, and Big Science had a large target painted on its back. Killing the SSC was a big-profile way of appearing to reduce spending while at the same time not damaging something that many people understood or cared about.

Since that time, the US has proved time and time again that they are incapable of sustaining funding for a long-term science project. All of the high-energy accelerators in the US are operationally shut down, and almost no proposals in the past 20 years or so have survived all the way to producing results before getting scrapped by some budget shortfall in a particular fiscal year. The LHC survives because the US is not such a major (or critical) contributor.

Re:WHY NOT IN THE FIRST PLACE !!

[0123456]

Can you explain what the actual, tangible benefits of throwing billions and billions of dollars at the SSC would have been? Other than a demand from Big Science for even more money a few years later to build Even Bigger Science?