Future and Present Particle Accelerators

John Ellis’s weblog has a new entry on Future Particle Accelerators which discusses prospects for a linear collider. The plan for an “International Linear Collider”, or ILC is now in its design phase, with work proceeding on a detailed design for a .5-1 Tev collider. No one has yet figured out where this would be sited or how it would be financed. The agencies responsible for this funding seem to have agreed to put off a decision about going ahead with the project until 2010.

By that time there should be a couple years of data available from the LHC, and if the Higgs particle or superpartners are found, it would be clear whether the ILC design would have enough energy to study them usefully. Also around that time is should be clear whether CERN’s more ambitious design for a linear collider, called “CLIC” and perhaps capable of reaching 3-4 Tev, is really a feasible one. If the decision is made to build the ILC design, the hope would be to have construction finished in 2015 (although this sounds overly optimistic to me), allowing several years of joint running of the LHC and ILC. If no Higgs or superpartners are found, or their mass is too high, the decision would be made to concentrate on CLIC, with construction done at the earliest in 2021.

Back in the present, the Tevatron at Fermilab is now seriously back in business after a long shut-down, recently reaching record values of luminosity. To follow what is going on there, you can keep up with the weblogs of Tommaso Dorigo and Sandra Leone of the CDF collaboration, as well as Gordon Watts and Ursula Bassler of D0.

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12 Responses to Future and Present Particle Accelerators

  1. Not a Nobel Laureate says:

    “Lubos said: “I just got a mail from Bill Gates. He WILL pay the Gates Supercollider (up to 20 billion USD), assuming that it will be a proton-antiproton machine and assuming that the director will be Melissa Franklin….”

    Are you saying it seriously or are you telling a joke? If you are not joking, then it really amazed me how could a young and brightest Harvard assistant professor be SO intelligently challenged, that you would actually believe it was an email from the real Bill Gates?”

    Well, Lubos did deduce, by the superior application of pure reason, that my post was from first Sheldon Glashow, then later revised to Paul Ginsarg (I don’t even know who he is) leading to the predictable result – he’s not even wrong.

    I’m reminded of Bronowski’s story of how Hegel had shown, using pure reason, that there can logically exist only 7 planets. Shortly afterwards the minor planet Ceres was discovered followed the 8th and 9th planets.

    String theory and loop QG strike me as similar exercises – attempts to deduce how the universe work solely by the application of “pure” reason.

    Expect similar results.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Bill is a great man. Windows stinks. Why is saying the second a cheapshot against Bill?

  3. Anonymous says:

    Despite my cheap joke and my love-hate relationship with Windows over the years, and not wanting to get off topic, I do actually have the greatest respect for B Gates, what he has achieved, and how he uses his wealth.

  4. Dick Thompson says:

    Re Gates: See the latest issue of the Economist about the Gates foundation’s donations to poor countries’ health – vaccinations, malaria eradication and much more. See also Bill’s techno attitudes toward how to go about that, which are treated very respectfully by the mag. Maybe time to stop with the cheap shots at Bill?

  5. Anonymous says:

    “Gates would insists that all accelerator computers use Microsoft operating systems…”
    I can just visualise that now.
    “Yes…I think we really can analyse this scattering data for evidence of supersymmetric particle production…but first of all we need to download another patch…”

  6. Anonymous says:

    Gates would insist all the accelerator computers use Microsoft operating systems, so I’d scratch that idea off the list if you actually want to get useful data from the machine. On the other hand, if you goal is just to skim off a little of that $20B, then go for it.

  7. Lubos Motl says:

    So far I am joking, of course, but we’ve considered various things along these lines.

  8. Quantoken says:

    Lubos said: “I just got a mail from Bill Gates. He WILL pay the Gates Supercollider (up to 20 billion USD), assuming that it will be a proton-antiproton machine and assuming that the director will be Melissa Franklin….”

    Are you saying it seriously or are you telling a joke? If you are not joking, then it really amazed me how could a young and brightest Harvard assistant professor be SO intelligently challenged, that you would actually believe it was an email from the real Bill Gates?

    Could it not be that some one, like Quantoken, forged that email? Why do you have to post it here and entertain every one :-)?

    Quantoken

  9. Luboš Motl says:

    I just got a mail from Bill Gates. He WILL pay the Gates Supercollider (up to 20 billion USD), assuming that it will be a proton-antiproton machine and assuming that the director will be Melissa Franklin. Many people try to convince him to pay a Gates Linear Collider (GLC), but he rejected to pay for something that does not orbit around.

    Thanks, Bill!

  10. Anonymous says:

    If letters are conserved I get
    MESON + SLIME BOLL + LOUT

  11. D R Lunsford says:

    Weyl was sure that his theory predicted 4D, because the Maxwell tensor squared was gauge invariant, in the original sense. In fact this actually doomed his theory from the outset. So Weyl was sort of doing “mathematical metaphysics”, which is fine.

  12. Fabio says:

    Personally, I’d like to collide Lubos Motl and Lee Smolin together at high velocity and see what comes out.

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