Particle Physicists Want A New Collider To Study The Higgs

[hue]

http://news.wpr.org/post/particle-physicists-want-new-collider-study-higgs

"It's a very curious time in high-energy physics," says Michael Peskin, a researcher at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. On the one hand, researchers have just made the most significant discovery in decades: In July of last year, they announced they had found the Higgs particle at a collider in Switzerland. The Higgs is part of the mechanism that gives mass to everything. It is so fundamental that without it, we wouldn't exist.

But at a time of intellectual highs, researchers are facing an economic low. Research funding is being squeezed by the economic crisis. The United States' main particle accelerator, the Tevatron, shut down in 2011.

"It's one of these things — it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Peskin says.

Earlier this month, hundreds of high-energy physicists gathered in Minneapolis to discuss the future of their field. "Somehow we have to figure out how to put our dreams together with the reality," he says.

High on the agenda is a new collider to study the newly found Higgs particle. The Higgs was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile underground ring that smashes protons together with an incredible amount of energy. The LHC is the perfect machine for finding the Higgs because when protons crash into each other, they create sprays of different particles, including the elusive Higgs.

But to study the Higgs in depth — and to produce only Higgs — researchers need to smash electrons and anti-electrons together, and this can only happen inside a new kind of collider.

[DreamGypsy]

1. The International Linear Collider (ILC) has been in the works about 10 years...

...and just two months ago they made available the design specifications and other documents put together by the International Collider Collaboration:

Published on 12 June 2013, The ILC Technical Design Report (TDR) is a five-volume report containing the blueprint for a future particle physics project. It marks the completion of many years of globally coordinated R&D and completes the mandate of the Global Design Effort. It contains all the elements needed to propose the ILC to collaborating governments, including a technical design and implementation plan, that are realistic and have been optimized for performance, cost and risk.

Highlights of the achievements include the successful construction and commissioning of superconducting radiofrequency test facilities for accelerators all over the world, great strides in the improvement of accelerating cavities production processes, and plans for mass production, as 16,000 superconducting cavities will be needed to drive the ILC’s particle beams. The details of the two state-of-the-art detectors that will record the collisions between electrons and positrons are also part of the report, as well as an extensive outline of the geological and civil engineering studies conducted for siting the ILC.

You can download pdfs of the design report here. (a couple of them are ~100MB)

Yes, the United States scientific community has to figure out how to convince the Congress to play in this very important game. Perhaps, if we smashed two Koch brothers together as sufficiently high energy we could ...

[hue]

2. Indeed I doubt it is in ALEC's agenda!!

[knitter4democracy]

3. FRIB and the MSU Cyclotron have been dealing with funding issues, too.

We need this research, and it is about time we put our money behind it.