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

Call it...

[cptnapalm]

the BFHC?

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

[joe_frisch]

Sadly its not that simple. Imagine lab "A" says they have a design they can build for 10B and lab "B" says it will cost $11B - and assume both labs have similar good reputations for building large projects. "A" gets the project and that means they get funded for the next ~15 years. Lab B gets downsized or even shut down because the high energy physics money is going to lab A. If the project works -great. But if not, and Lab A has put in an unreasonably low estimate at least they still exist, and after 15 years many of the managers responsible have retired.

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.

What happens is that you create a very strong motivation for under-estimates because that at least keeps the lab alive. Combine that with the difficulty of estimating the cost of something that hasn't been done yet, and a long enough project timescale that changing economic conditions can substantially change labor and construction costs. This is why many projects like this go over budget.

I don't think this is unique to government. I suspect that Boeing doesn't do a good job of estimating the development cost of a new airliner either - and that is much less of a technological extrapolation than the high energy physics machines.

Re:Dallas?

[i kan reed]

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.

I'm all for putting Donald Trump underground, but shouldn't we cover the hole with dirt afterwards?

Re:Dallas?

[EvilSS]

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

Not sure how dropping a few billionaires into a hole in Texas would help get this project built but I'm not opposed to trying it.

Re:Dallas?

[SomeKDEUser]

This is true, but no so simple: in a straight line, you gain energy with the distance. When going round, you lose energy to stay in the loop as a function of the radius (the infinite radius case brings you back to the straight line). Thus, each time you want more energy, your collider ring needs to have considerably larger radius (following a third power law). At some point (basically the point after this proposal) you have to loop around the solar system :)

Re:Dallas?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a tradeoff in circular/linear accelerators. Linear accelerators let you collide leptons (usually electrons) efficiently and leptons provide a MUCH cleaner signal. A comparable energy circular accelerator can be shorter, but due to bremsstrahlung losses, you have to collide hadrons (like protons), which provides a much messier signal.

After you do some rough calculations of what particles you can collide, their energies and the number of interactions per second, you then take those numbers and plug them into a model of a hypothetical detector along with a number of theories you'd like to explore to see which configuration gives you the biggest "bang for your buck"

The issue is that different people are more interested in probing different kinds of physics and it's impossible to make a detector/accelerator that's sensitive enough to fully probe everything, so big arguments happen at places like Snowmass. We know that we basically can only ask for one multi-billion dollar accelerator, so everyone's fighting to keep their pet research alive.

Re:Why?

[Bite The Pillow]

We don't yet know. Isn't that terribly exciting? That is basic research at its finest.

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:Dallas?

[GodfatherofSoul]

No need to fill in the hole; just comb over it.