While often heartbreaking, this competition between accelerators is also necessary, Zimmermann says.

“The SSC cancellation helped the LHC get approved, and then the US joined the LHC.” “Originally, the SSC was competing with the LHC,” Zimmermann says. The approval for the LHC came just one year after the cancelation of an accelerator the US planned to build in an 84-kilometer (52-mile) tunnel in Texas, the Superconducting Supercollider. Not every proposed accelerator will be built. It was only in 2010-26 years after scientists submitted their initial proposal-that the LHC’s experiments saw first collisions. In fact, the first formal proposal for the LHC came in 1984. Scientists began working on this years ago because they know supercolliders don’t come together overnight. The results of these discussions will shape the next 100 years of particle physics research. “Individuals have their own preferences,” Klute says. Scientists in countries and regions around the world are considering the possibilities. Physicists have also put years into developing plans for other possible next accelerators, such as the Compact Linear Collider at CERN, the International Linear Collider in Japan, the Circular Electron-Positron Collider and Super Proton-Proton Collider in China, and even a muon collider in the United States. The US Department of Energy and CERN recently signed an agreement to conduct joint research on the feasibility of the Future Circular Collider, or FCC, with a circular electron-positron collider as a possible first stage.

We cannot lose, not with a machine like this.” Even if we don’t see new physics, that is still a breakthrough. “When we do this kind of big exploration, we always learn new things. “We need to go significantly beyond what we can do today,” says Markus Klute, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This proposed collider would connect to CERN’s pre-existing accelerator complex, pass under nearby Lake Geneva and then encircle the Salève mountain. This time, they went big, discussing a 100-TeV circular proton collider to be built in a new subterranean tunnel between 80 and 100 kilometers (50 and 62 miles) long. “That was not the purpose of the workshop.”įour years later, the physicists took the lessons they learned in Malta and hosted another workshop: The Future Circular Collider Study Kickoff Meeting, held at the University of Geneva. “It came out accidentally,” Zimmermann says. How could we justify spending billions of Swiss Francs on a project that would be ‘nice’ for physics?”Īfter many hours of debate, the participants came to a new realization: If they wanted the next accelerator to be worth it, they needed a bigger tunnel. “For me this was a clear ‘no go’ message. “Basically, the prominent physicist said, ‘Doubling the LHC energy would be nice!’” “We asked a very prominent theoretical physicist to give us a talk, which was supposed to motivate and excite us,” CERN scientist Steve Myers wrote in the scientific journal Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.Īccording to the presentation, the maximum energy another 17-mile accelerator could achieve was double the LHC’s design value: from 14 to 30 TeV. The question that so dominated the workshop participants’ time: What next-generation accelerator should they build in CERN’s 17-mile subterranean tunnel once the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider were complete? The answer was not obvious. “The Russians were swimming in the ocean after midnight. But “we were picked up by a bus early in the morning, and then dropped back at the hotel late at night,” says Frank Zimmermann, an accelerator physicist at CERN. The workshop was held in Malta, a Mediterranean island country and tourist destination south of Italy. Not the international 2010 High-Energy LHC Workshop. Most scientific conferences balance serious physics discussions with at least some amount of leisure time.

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