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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."
the BFHC?
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?
It was planned to have an 87 KM circumference and is already partially built.
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?
I am sure that they like it but the question really is where to find the money. A 80-100 km tunnel surely cannot be cheap. Various sources on the internet indicate a cost of 0.04 to 4 billion dollars per kilometer. And that is for the tunnel alone... Maybe someone from the field could enlighten us?
Are they just going to keep multiplying the size of the thing by a factor of 'X' every 'Y' years? ;-)
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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 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?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I mean particle physics is cool, but it doesn't do anything for the human spirit of exploration like a mission to Mars would.
Reading the design study by Peter Limon (http://vlhc.org/Limon_seminar.pdf), I couldn't help but notice that it made rather liberal use of Comic Sans.
I'll probably burn some of my karma to say this, but I must say it: Nothing screams professionalism like Comic Sans.
You might be right about the VLHC. I think the 100km circumference is meant considering current/near future magnet technologies. AFAIK when designing LHC to fit into LEP they planned for magnets that did not exist at that time. Maybe with a really good advance in magnet tech VLHC can fit inisde LHC tunnel ...
Shouldn't it be the Larger Hadron Collider?
meanwhile, in the great state of Texas, we have a very large hole with nothing to show for the effort. YAY JESUSLAND!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They should kickstarter the money for it. I'll throw in $50. Flex goals: Stargate; flux capacitor; warp drive.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
This is like the quest for horsepower. One guy gets a supercharger, the other gets twin turbos. One guy sees a car producing 1150 HP while his only produces 1100. Next thing you know he's ripping out parts just to get that little bit more. I think the scientists on the LHC are over-compensating, maybe we should just send them packages of Enzyte instead?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
At what percentage of C would a 100TeV proton be traveling?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Could that be possible? To build a particle collider in the orbit (or at a Lagrange point). Focusing of the beam wouldn't be easy, but it would be certainly doable. I'm thinking a straight collider or a giant laser like setup. I wonder how protected the system should be of outside interference?
The cosmic rays themselves probably randomly collide too with each other and create exotic byproducts. I wonder what's the actual chance of a natural head-on collision...
How are we ever going to get the amount of helium required to fill such a large tunnel? The LHC is already using a large amount of all the helium we have on this planet. It is going to become awfully expensive at least to get that much helium together, if we can manage it at all.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Well, many of these tunnels, including the one the LHC uses, have been refurbished multiple times already. Cern's main ring was built to be somewhat future-proof, but that was a long time ago. A google search came up with The history of CERN, which dates the groundbreaking to 1954.
In accelerators you have two basic designs: linear and circular(ish). In linear accelerators each boosting element (RF cavity or whatnot) gets one chance to give the beam particles a kick, so the energy is limited to how hard you kick (limited by technology) and how many elements / how long (limited by budget).
In circular accelerators you are limited by synchrotron radiation. At some point the energy pumped into the beam matches the energy lost via synchrotron radiation. To move in a circle you have to accelerate inwardly, and an accelerating charged particle radiates light. At particle accelerator energies, this radiation is in the x-ray spectrum. You can reduce the loss by using a larger ring -- a smaller curvature requires less centripetal acceleration and hence less radiation loss. You can also of course build stronger boosting elements, but the radiation also heats the beamline and surrounding superconducting magnets, so it's not "that simple."
The other thing to vary is the kind of particle accelerated. Electrons have a very small mass and lose a larger fraction of their momentum to synchrotron radiation. SLAC and KEK are linear accelerators that use electrons. (Cornell's CESR is a ring that accelerates electrons too, but at lower energies compared to these others.) Protons are the other obvious choice, which is what Fermilab and CERN's LHC (after the upgrade) are accelerating. Being much more massive, the protons slough off less of their momentum to synchrotron radiation and can be accelerated to higher energies given the same size ring. The disadvantage of protons is that the energy of the proton is shared among its three quarks (and gluons I think) whereas the electron is truly singular as far as can be told.
I've been out of touch lately but as of at least 8 years ago three proposals were being discussed: VLHC -- big ring accelerating protons. Next Linear Collider (NLC) -- long linear accelerator for electrons. Muon collider -- a smaller ring (actually with straight sections like a track&field track) that produces and accelerates muons. Muons are just like electrons only 200 times more massive and is unstable with a half-life of 2 microseconds. The muon collider was thought to be an ideal Higgs factory, but with a lot of design challenges. One of the main challenges is to not only accelerate the muons before they decay, but also collimate, or "cool", the beam very fast as well so that you can create as many head-on collisions as possible.
So the news that the VLHC design is currently in favor is interesting, but this is hardly the first time the issue has been discussed and I doubt it will be the last. Several years ago the NLC design seemed most favorable, but this would, by its length, be limited to a specific design energy and probably be built to produce Higgs, Higgs, and more Higgs. It seems to me like a VLHC would have more discovery potential for more massive Higgs particles, signs of supersymmetry, or whatever else might exist.
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.
These physicists wont be happy until they open a black hole that swallows the earth..
\gamma = E/m
E = 50 TeV, m = 938 MeV
v (in units of c) = \sqrt(\gamma^2 - 1)/\gamma
Or in other words, far more 9s than a double will hold. The rest is left as an exercise to the reader :)
"So we'll just have to try again." -Mad Scientists
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?
They need to get a naming convention started.
If the present one is the Large Hadron Collider, the next one the Very Large Hadron Collider, then the following one should be the Ultra Large Hadron Collider.
1. Large Hadron Collider
2. Very Large Hadron Collider
3. Ultra Large Hadron Collider
4. Extremely Large Hadron Collider
5. Gargantuan Large Hadron Collider
6. Mammoth Large Hadron Collider
7. Unbelievably Large Hadron Collider
8. Inconceivably Large Hadron Collider
9. Budget Busting Large Hadron Collider
After this, there won't be money left to build any more.
Each new larger collider should be constructed with it's center at the same center point as previous colliders. Thus all of the colliders form a set of concentric rings. They can be called the Nine Circles of Collision.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
When the LHC was first built I was impressed by the multi billion $USD cost. Now we spend that much just bailing out a bank so they can pay bonuses to their never-indicted criminal executives.
It's funny how we can't afford to repair our bridges and schools, but when it comes to bailouts and worthless wars, cost is no consideration.
These physicists are going to have to wash a lot of dishes to get that puppy in their xmas stocking.
You hit numerical problems if you calculate it that way. Wikipedia gives a series expansion that works well for large values of gamma:
v (in units of c) = 1 - 1/2 \gamma^(-2)
v = c (1 - 1.8e-10), or 0.99999999982 c
I can top that if I put on my running keds.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Plaid
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
These days the major ideas are:
ILC: A superconducting electron linac based collider. Significant chance the Japanese will host this - we'll know more in a year or so.
CLIC: A CERN design normal conducting 2-beam electron linac (x-band). Sort of a hybrid of the old SLAC X-band NLC concept and the old CLIC 30GHz 2-beam machine. Technically challenging (very tight alignment tolerances), but possible.
Muon collider: Fermilab and others. Very ambitious, completely new type of machine, very difficult.
Plasma accelerators - beam or laser driven. They can get huge gradients >10GV/M in experiments, but very far from ready for a real machine.
Then there will likely be LHC luminosity and energy upgrades.
VLHC has been discussed for decades. Its the obvious next step for proton machines - but when and if we will take that step isn't clear.
Do we have some untested models or hypothesis that demand 100 TeV to verify? Otherwise, what are we building it for?
Back in my sciencey days, I was always taught that one had to have a question to be answered in mind before going off and designing cool experiments.
Have gnu, will travel.
It difficult to predict the benefits of machines that were not built. From past machines, work on linear electron colliders like the SLAC SLC and the never built but lots of R&D TESLA, and NLC led to high brightness electron linacs. Those are now being used to drive X-ray free electron lasers (DESY:FLASH, SLAC:LCLS, Spring-8 SCCS, Trieste , etc).
Those X-ray lasers are now being used extensively for practical research: protein structure measurement, femtosecond chemistry, superconductivity research, magnetic materials research, etc. Much of this has practical application in a 10 year timescale. The existing machines have so many users lined up ( we need to turn down 3/4 or our proposals at LCLS), that a bunch of new machines are being built or proposed around the world. (these are ~1B$ machines).
Then of course there are the spinoffs in low latency networks and distributed ffeedback, precision machining, etc.
Whether the basic physics will have practical applications is always difficult to tell. In the past, overall basic science has been a great investment, but it is difficult to tell if any particular investment will pay off.
But of course there is always a demand for bigger science.
For starters, job creation and economic investment. I know the area near the SSC and almost everyone there will tell you when it was under construction the entire area was projected to undergo a massive economic boom. It started to do it too until the project was cancelled and then things stagnated in the area pretty badly. It has only been in the past 5 or so years that there has been significant growth for that area because everything changed direction.
Dallas now has several major economic sectors, but scientific research is way behind for it. If the SSC had actually been completed, that area would probably be one of the largest scientific hubs in the world by now and we likely would have found the Higgs (and other things) a lot earlier. This in turn would have generated a much greater demand to come to the US for STEM type education and research and likely would have helped our post secondary and general secondary education system flourish as opposed to what is happening now with them struggling to keep up with rising costs (especially in Texas, where the secondary education is abysmal in most areas). If even a small ROI had been shown that probably would have helped the scientific community in the US in general with some of these larger projects and we would likely being growing that sector much better than now (funny, that is now what half the country has talked we NEED to do in order to continue competing on the global market...).
Other industries would have also been able to grow out of the construction and maintenance efforts and Dallas would probably have seen some amazing growth from that alone. Not to mention the indirect benefits of growing the field causing other improvements in the long run. Big Science is like IT, very necessary and can have tremendous benefits, but since you can't easily quantify all those benefits on paper people will shoot it down (kind of ironic considering that is the entire point of most hard science fields, quantification and making it easier to understand).
> If you have just one ring, then you have to collide matter and antimatter
Your posting is as self-confident as it is wrong.
Please educate yourself using the internet before posting again.
> Then there are the problems with neutrino radiation
> (I'm not kidding - it can exceed allowable dose limits).
I'm wondering what size the neutrino-dosimeters everybody has to carry will be :-)
That depends on what you mean by "tangible benefits." One argument I've heard for practical, what's-in-it-for-me-today benefits is that the technology produces spin-offs such as techniques to mass-produce rare-earth magnets, the world-wide web, etc. But that's honestly a weak argument because there's a lot of research going on that has similar chances to produce spin-off tech.
For particle physics, the feeling is that we are on the verge of some kind of revolution! Admittedly it's been that way for a few decades now, but the current working theory (the standard model) has a number of deep problems (thanks wikipedia!). Most new theories, and there are a whole lot of them, predict new phenomena just at the edge of our experimental reach. Part of that is because well-meaning theorists prefer to propose theories that are either presently or soon-to-be testable. But part of it is because the experimental frontier has advanced to energies at roughly the electroweak unification point and lots of theories have interesting behavior to predict at this point, broadly speaking.
So it's not just a more-is-better kind of effort that won't stop until we build solar-system-sized accelerators. There really is a sense that a major shift, possibly even a philosophically-challenging development, is nearly within our grasp, within our lifetimes. This is not a "practical" argument for basic science, but only history can tell us what has had short and long-term practical benefits. History does tell us that this sort of pursuit has in the past been enormously beneficial. Maybe we are in a whole new era where new physics will be completely impractical, but that would honestly be surprising if true.
"There are however some possible....failure modes."
Like a black hole consuming the earth? ;)
We don't yet know. Isn't that terribly exciting?
Speaking as a particle physicist that's not really right. There is a lot of physics which we need to explain the universe but which we have not yet found. The one looming largest is Dark Matter. While we do not know, and cannot accurately predict, what a VLHC will find it is not true to say that we do not have a shopping list of what it might find - Dark Matter currently being on the top of that list. Even if the LHC solves that mystery first (we turn on in March 2015 with twice the energy so fingers crossed!) one possible solution is something called Supersymmetry. In such a case it is unlikely that the LHC will have enough energy to see all of SUSY and so the VLHC would be one way to find the missing sparticles.
Of course this is jumping the gun considerably since we have not found any new physics yet! If we find something like SUSY then there VLHC will receive a boost and may well get built next. However if there is no new physics found at the LHC my guess is that the next collider will be an electron-positron linear collider. This will do precision studies of the Higgs which is a good way to get hints at the next energy scale for new physics. Indeed it is the results from LEP (the e+/e- collider that predated the LHC) which told us that the Higgs mass was below 1TeV/c2 and so set the energy scale for the LHC.
The critical determining factor is the particle mass. The power radiated goes as 1/m^5 (IIRC) so a particle with a mass ten times smaller will radiate energy 100,000 times faster when accelerated. This means that for electrons any higher energy machine will be linear whereas for protons, with 500,000 times the mass, circular machines will be the winner for a long time to come.
"Do you really throw away $10B to save 2B?"
You do if it is politically motivated, and everything is at those cost levels.
Canadian example:
Long Gun Registry was supposed to cost X (I don't remember, but in the millions), and ended up costing like 3$ Billion (with a B). So way over budget.
The Conservatives wanted to get rid of it, and used the excuse that it was a waste of money and served no purpose.
One might argue about its merits or not, many thought it was useful, however purportedly it cost about 3$ million annually to maintain.
Which is silly. The analogy I like to make is it is like buying a 30,000$ car, and upon seeing that you have to pay 30$ a year to keep it running, you would rather throw it into the trash because you are not sure how much you will actually drive it!
(There you go Slashdot, car analogy!)
Ironically the Conservatives are the ones that like to pass themselves off as financially savvy and the PM has an economist background. In the end, it doesn't really matter, there is politically ideology, whatever justification you can make that you can swindle people into is good enough.
Perhaps you would have proved the existence of the Higgs Boson 20 years earlier, and then research would have been 20 years ahead of where it is today?
It's like oil exploration, maybe 9 out of 10 exploration wells don't find anything, but that 1 out of 10 has a pay off that covers the cost of that exploration.
Same with the movie industry.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Put it on the Moon. Sounds goofy, until one realizes that is could be setup on the surface, and faster than digging a donut type tunnel. Also, the rent I hear is cheap on the Moon.
The giant machine would dwarf all of its predecessors (see 'Lord of the rings').
See what? The movie with the little people?
Oh no, I see what happened. Someone copied and pasted the summary without due care and attention.
Have you read what it says on the Submit page?
Please try to use your own words; if you're quoting another source, make that clear.
Either, editors, police that rule, or just remove it. Might as well do the latter since very few people actually submit their own words, as far as I can tell.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The Superconducting Super Collider was to be about 87 km in circumference, and about 27 km of the tunnel has already been bored. Why not start the project from there?
Can you explain what the actual, tangible benefits of throwing hundreds of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars at the US Military would have been? Other than a demand from The Military Industrial Complex for even more money a few years later to build Even Bigger Weapons?
FTFY... Note the change in the orders of magnitude.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Thanks!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
An LHC the size of a garden gnome should be big enough for anyone.
Pnårp's docile & perfunctory page!