Is that the best site?
"likely to be sited in Japan"
This thing is going to be huge, and need extremely accurate alignment. Isn't Japan rather too prone to earthquakes to be a suitable site for it?
The scientific world is preparing for the arrival of a even larger Large Hadron Collider, after the publication of blueprints for a next generation proton-punisher. A five volume report containing the plans for the International Linear Collider has been handed over to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) …
Earthquakes were my first thought too. The second was, as I understand it, Japan's already a financial basket case, with a demographic time bomb on top of that like a fat toxic cherry.
If so I can't see how their offer to pay for half will mean anything in the medium to long term. Anyone here with any financial insight care to opine?
with a stable beam in the PS, we could see the Mediterranean but mostly Atlantic tides slightly moving France on our beam diagnostics. And that was on the other side of the country, behind an Alp or two.
With linear colliders, they're rather less subtle than stochastically cooled circular ones - you generate a current, and launch/accelerate it in a straight line down an evacuated tube for a single 'bang', each run might well be different, whilst with synchrotron colliders like LHC you get to see nearly the same bunch of particles 27km/c =~ every 90 microseconds and can so prepare the beam 'density' a bit better?
I suppose I'll have to read the design report and see how it might be a good linear design? Last I heard it was hoped that the big interesting linear collider might go to DESY near Hamburg... are you still designing it Nick?
Oh & BTW , hadrons are multi-quark fuzzinesses - eg protons, pbars, neutrons, mesons, pions - not exactly e's and ebars - which are leptons, so might El'Reg be referring to the Huge Lepton Collider?
Japan!, certainly not, far away, foreigners speaking a language only they understand, earthquakes and lack of power living on some small island. We should not be so decent but claim our right to build this device here, though not in Wales or Scotland, of course. And if those farmers in, was it Japan or something, insist of having the right to take part in the financing we should consider that too, and give them a fair chance. I will send my MP a letter right now.
Agreed, building a massive precision instrument like this right on the Ring of Fire is just plain asking for it. But we've sited all our electronics manufacturing in the same disaster area, so why not go the whole hog like the geniuses we are?
My personal preference to site something like this would be Siberia or the Australian outback. Somewhere there's no tectonic activity at all and the thing can sit nice and stably on top of a big fat granitic continental craton that isn't going anywhere.
This is a good idea for japan. Economically they are having problems yet have the technical ability. They also have a power issue and a lot of people who cant count (how many of the many died due to radiation- 0). How else do you insist that money needs to be spent on reliable power supplies. And with such a development in japan they could surely exploit that further and maybe revive their economy
Linears are not really high-energy accelerators. Even when at full power, the ILC (from my googling) is only 1TeV, while the LHC is 7TeV. It does have the the advantage of being able to accelerate light particles, something at which (for reasons of Science) circular accelerators like the LHC totally suck.
So while the LHC continues bashing up heavy particles (the heavier, the better - there's a reason it uses whole ions), the ILC will be performing experiments upon an entirely different set of much lighter, more fundamental particles. They aren't duplicating work.
Absolutely Correct! El Reg has to review its "nucular nomenclature".
Also, at The Well-Informed Blog of Peter Woit, we read, back in August 2012:
For many years now discussion in the HEP community of what might be the appropriate next machine to try and finance and build after the LHC has centered around the idea of a linear electron-positron collider. The logic has been that an electron-positron machine would provide a much better environment that the LHC for detailed studies of physics at the TeV scale. At these energies, synchrotron radiation losses when accelerating electrons are so high in a circular geometry that such a machine would have to be a linear collider to keep the power needed something plausible. The two main proposals under study have been the ILC (250 GeV + 250 GeV, later upgradeable to 500 GeV + 500 GeV) and, a less mature technology, CLIC (1.5 TeV + 1.5 TeV). These would be very expensive machines to build and operate ($10 billion and up?), requiring completely new technology, tunnels and detectors.
But also:
This realization is driving a new proposal that is getting a lot of attention: the idea of going back to circular electron-positron colliders, building a new machine in the LHC tunnel, optimized as a Higgs factory, and designed to operate at 120 GeV + 120 GeV. This is being called “LEP3″, since it would be in many ways similar to LEP2, the predecessor machine to the LHC, which operated in the same tunnel, reaching an energy of 209 GeV. There would be huge cost advantages to building such a machine over the ILC or CLIC, since it can use the LHC tunnel, infrastructure, and, crucially, the CMS and ATLAS detectors (the detectors are a large part of the cost of a new accelerator).
Plus, I have heard that Muon Factories to generate copious amounts of high-energy Neutrinos (so copious and high-energy that they actually pose a radiation hazard downrange of the collider) would be of mucho interest in studying neutrino physics, where quite a lot of questions are open and parameters are floating around. But the technology ain't even on the paper yet.
15 miles of special built tunnel are lying vacant.
let's go to see the supercollider
Not sure I understand why making a brand new installation is better than reviving the SSC.
That's a bit like upgrading from a Bentley to a Bugatti, when you know that what you really need is a supersonic jet. Not a big enough advance to be worth paying that much for. The LHC is the biggest ring we'll build in any forseeable future.
Linear accelerators are the most obvious way we might get a really big advance. In outline ... an electric field of a million volts per meter, over ten kilometers, is 10GV. Subject a proton to that and because it's ~2000 times more massy than an electron, that's ~20TeV. Now work on higher field strengths ... none of this is impossible, it's just unknown territory in engineering terms.
For a rather further-fetched idea, look up PASER (and consider where we are today, starting from some theoretical 1930s papers on the field effect ... with a big detour via germanium junction transistors).
I don't think my post had any typos, or are you just ragging on Yanks generally? You might want to seek some further education yourself, creating a false dichotomy between basic education and advanced research, as if those were the only two aspects of our society that relied on government funding. Personally, I'd rather see cuts start with the military and intelligence departments, but even that's a pretty sweeping generalization.
At any rate, I have a theory (well, actually, a baseless conjecture) about why big physics projects are vitally important to the future of humanity: they are there to keep the physicists safely entertained and distracted. We all remember what happened the last time the greatest physicists on the planet all got together and worked on something with concrete real-world consequences.
It would have been awesome. But politics killed it by lack of funding, and IIRC parts of it have been even sold out. It's currently one of the largest abandoned constructions of the modern world.
Why not? It's no different to the everyday usage of "nuke it"!
Doesn't everyone know about natural cosmic rays up to10^19 eV, and the number of them that have interacted with the sun in the last 4 billion years? (Hint: the sun is BIG). If really high energy particles had any untoward effects on large collections of matter, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. (Or the fun alternative, maybe they once DID have dramatic effects on the pre-universe, and that's WHY we're here talking about it! )
The difference is that they're relatively small and rigid structures that can survive the gradual distortion of the ground they are built on bt anything less than a truly huge earthquake. Whereas a LINAC 10km long that has to be dead straight might end up bent out of alignment, which would ruin it.
A picture from California is worth a thousand words
http://www.und.edu/instruct/mineral/101intro/slides/faults/slide19.htm
...They have one of those ring shaped things over at SLAC (it is at the end of the two mile long slingshot). I even visited it. Granted, it is a few (40 years) old, but it did produce some good science (and may still, I haven't kept up). Yes, it is a ring about 100 feet in diameter ("small" by today's standards) but just put some bigger coils and pump up the volume, and you could be good to go.
And Yes, they DID discover particles there.
Doesn't work. The trouble is that charged particles emit electromagnetic radiation when you change the direction they are moving. The higher the energy of the particles and the tighter the bend, the more they do it. You reach a limit where it's not feasible to pump in energy any faster than the particles are shedding it, and the only way around that is a bigger ring (or ideally a straight line for zero losses, which is where this discussion started).
According to the first random website I found, the distance from Tokyo to Geneva is 9803.55km, and that's as the bird flies, rather than in a straight line through the Earth's crust/core. Assuming that a bubble nucleation event domain wall would propagate at the speed of light, I make it at most an extra 32.7 milliseconds to contemplate our lot...
ILC is an electron-positron collider, not a proton-proton or proton-antiproton collider. Electrons and positrons are leptons, not hadrons. 500GeV per beam is sufficiently above the 125 GeV mass of the Higgs that they expect to be able to create massive numbers of Higgs particles, cleanly, without as much QCD background as the LHC produces. The LHC uses more massive particles so it can reach higher energies so is better for discovery, the ILC would be cleaner and better for precise measurement.
The Register, as usual, gets all the details wrong in favor of attitude...
What did (Prof. Sir. ) Neville Mott get out of studying the field effect in the 1930s? At the time it was just theoretical physics. It wasn't even the first sort of transistor we made ....
Curiosity has survival value, or at least always has done until now. If it hadn't, we'd have evolved out of it. (And I'm not even sure we're the most curious species. If there were a way to normalize curiosity by intellectual capacity, I'm sure cats would beat us).
The ILC is a lepton collider, not a hadron collider. At least pretend to do some research before writing this crap.
As for Japan not being the best location, the trouble with the ILC is that pretty much every other country stopped funding the idea years ago. Since Japan are the only ones still working on it, of course they're going to suggest it's built in Japan in their tentative proposal. If anyone actually decides to join and the thing has any chance of actually happening, the final location will depend entirely on who is involved and what options there actually are to choose from.
One question from someone who knows next to nothing about these machines: I thought the LHC had closed for upgrading to a more powerful spec, how much more powerful is this new gadget than the upgraded LHC?, and won't the LHC be able to study the Higgs Boson in more detail in its new upgraded form which according to the above article is one justification for the ILC?.
I think the problem with the LHC and other circular colliders is the amount of energy expended in making the particle change direction constantly (how it goes in a circle) increases the amount of extra "noise" in the experiment. A linear accelerator eliminates the problem by not having to change the particles direction (apart from minor corrections).
Imagine how hard it would be to get a car up to 200mph while continuously driving around a roundabout, it would take huge amounts of energy and it wouldn't take long before bits were flying off the car, Now take the same car and accelerate it down a straight road, far less energy would be needed.