The “Reference Design Report” for the ILC was released today, and here’s a presentation about this from Barry Barish, the director of the ILC GDE (Global Design Effort). The most closely held numbers in the report have been the cost estimates (see here for a document about the status of cost estimates that warns “don’t post cost estimates on public web or wiki sites!”).
The cost estimate comes out to $4.87 billion for the technology components, $1.78 billion in site-specific costs, 13000 person-years of labor, and two detectors (no cost estimate for these). In round numbers, roughly $10 billion. The machine would consist of two 11km linacs end-to-end, with an interaction region in which two detectors could be moved in and out. The biggest part of the cost is the cost of the linacs, which would accelerate electrons and positrons to tunable energies with collisions at center of mass energy between 200 and 500 Gev. A possible future upgrade of the machine would take it to 1 Tev.
The plan for the future is to start working on a “Technical Design”, a much more detailed design that would show exactly how to build the machine. The hope is to make a decision on whether to build the ILC around 2010, based on what the LHC has found, and on how much progress CERN has made on the much more ambitious CLIC design. Construction would take 7 years, so the earliest such a machine could be in operation would be around 2017.
The full report is here.
Update: More at Science magazine and the New York Times.
Update: Joanne Hewett has an excellent detailed posting about this over at Cosmic Variance.
A small price to pay to test string theory and find our place in the multiverse!
Peter said “… The “Reference Design Report” for the ILC … cost estimate comes out … [i]n round numbers, roughly $10 billion …”.
A competing way to spend a comparable amount is on a new aircraft carrier ($8 billion in construction cost alone) .
According to a navydata web page:
“… The CVN 21 Program is the future aircraft carrier replacement program for USS Enterprise and CVN 68-Class aircraft carriers. …
The total cost to build the lead ship … CVN 78 … is $8.1B in FY08$.
The Navy expects to award the CVN 78 construction contract in FY08 with an expected delivery in FY15. …
the total ownership cost for CVN 78 … over its 50 year service life … is expected to be $26.8B …”.
In short, by foregoing a new navy aircraft carrier, the USA fund its share of the ILC and have around a couple of billion left over (maybe to fund high energy theory alternatives to superstring theory?).
According to an 8 February 2007 Reuters article by Edmund Blair:
“… Iran’s Revolutionary Guards test-fired missiles on Thursday …
“These missiles, with a maximum range of 350 km (220 miles), can hit different kinds of big warships in all of the Persian Gulf, all of the Sea of Oman and the north of the Indian Ocean,” senior Revolutionary Guards naval commander Ali Fadavi said.
Fadavi was also quoted by the state broadcaster’s Web site as saying that the 500-kg (1,100-lb) warhead of this missile had the capacity to sink “all kinds of big warships” …”.
A military commentator, Gary Brecher, said back around December 2002:
“… A few years ago, a US submarine commander said, “There are two kinds of ship in the US Navy: subs and targets.” …”.
Why doesn’t the USA forgo building a new big target for enemy missiles,
and
use that money toward building the ILC ?
The carrier construction cost alone is over 80% of the total ILC cost estimate, and should by itself more than cover the USA contribution toward the international ILC project.
Tony Smith
PS – Here is a bit more from the military analysis web page mentioned above:
“.. The fact that big surface ships are dinosaurs is something that’s gotten clearer every decade since 1921. … the aircraft carrier is now: a big, proud, expensive…sitting duck. Aircraft carriers came out of WW II looking powerful, but that was before microchips. …
what about Iran? … The Iranians are … smart, they’re dedicated, and they hate us like poison. … Give the Navy the benefit of the doubt and say they get 90% of the incoming missiles. You still end up with a dead carrier. …
… if Iran gets involved, those carriers won’t last one day. … And the sickest part is that the admirals and the captains and the contractors all know it. …
it won’t be the brass who die. It’ll be the poor trusting kids on those carriers who’ll die, the poor suckers who thought they’d get free training and a world tour, or even get the chance to “defend America.” They’ll die not even believing what’s happening to them as the whole giant hulk starts cracking up and sliding into the water. …”.
‘Construction would take 7 years, so the earliest such a machine could be in operation would be around 2017.’
Who is predicting that the LHC won’t provide the evidence for the real electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism within 10 years?
Or is this new project really more concerned with searching for massive stringy bosonic superpartners?
Q,
The LHC will actually reach higher energies than the ILC, but if it finds something interesting, it may be very difficult to study it due to the much more complicated nature of proton-proton vs. electron positron collisions.
Basically, if the LHC finds nothing new in its accessible energy range except the expected SM Higgs, it will be hard to make the case for the ILC. If, as people hope, something new shows up, depending on what it is, the ILC may be needed to study it. One popular example is supersymmetry. Some people expect the LHC to see all sorts of superpartners, and the ILC would be a much better machine for studying these (IF their masses are low enough) than the LHC. In general, if the LHC finds that there’s something more interesting going on in electroweak symmetry breaking than a scalar Higgs, again the ILC may be the right machine to study the phenomenon. All depends on exactly what it is….
Q asks “… is this new project [ the ILC ] really more concerned with searching for massive stringy bosonic superpartners? …”.
No.
Although the ILC might see stringy stuff such as superpartners if they exist (my opinion is that they do not exist),
that is not why I think that a high-energy lepton collider such as the ILC should be built. Here is why a non-superstringer like me wants to build such a thing:
The ILC could do a lot more precision tests of the Standard Model than LHC can do, so the ILC could either:
1 – find more subtle new stuff than can be seen at the LHC
or
2 – verify the Standard Model to much greater precision.
Either result would be significant.
For example, the EPP2010 report said in part:
“… The ILC will probe the Standard Model with unprecedented precision … involving the masses, lifetimes, and reaction rates of W and Z particles, top quarks, possibly Higgs particles, and others. If the Standard Model survives these tests, physicists will gain a new level of confidence in its validity and scope.
…
Even such a basic property of the Higgs particle as its spin cannot be easily measured at the LHC. The Standard Model requires that the Higgs particle has no spin … If a Higgs particle is discovered, the spin can
be measured straightforwardly by determining the rate at which it is produced at different energies at the ILC. …”.
Therefore, I disagree with Peter when he says “… if the LHC finds nothing new in its accessible energy range except the expected SM Higgs, it will be hard to make the case for the ILC …”.
Tony Smith
My colleagues also argue point 2) about high precision measurements of the standard model. That arguement may sell to high energy physicists but I think it will be a hard sell to the other parts of the APS, let alone the general public… so we’d better hope for positive discoveries from the LHC.
The $6.7 billion number is in `European’ accounting & does not include overhead, contingency or any money for detectors. In `US accounting’ the total is closer to $15B…
At this point it seems quite unlikely that the ILC will be funded unless it is adopted by one or more Asian economic power (most likely China, but maybe India and/or Japan) seeking to make an essentially nationalist political statement about having “arrived” in the advanced world. The problem is that even the Standard Model, with all of its vaunted (perhaps excessively vaunted) cleverness and accuracy of prediction, has not made much difference on any politically significant issue … still less to anything that a Western politician could point to as justification for spending over $10 Billion in tax money … or even a substantial portion of that inevitably-to-bloat figure. Once one moves to questions outside the Standard Model things get even flakier and harder to justify financially and politically. So what’s the point from a political perspective? That’s the main reason why the old Super Conducting Super Collider eventually came to be seen as mere “pork” in the US Congress. That “pork” perception led to its defunding, since there were other pork projects with far more influential constituencies than any that supported the SCSC. (The LHC builders were lucky that Europe loves this kind of pork, but even Europe’s appetite for physi-pork seems sated by the LHC itself.) It’s hard to imagine what question the ILC possibly could settle or illuminate that would justify its cost in the political theater. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for academic researchers to imagine just such a question that matters to them … which speaks mostly for the political, economic and historical detachment of the current crop of academic researchers. Undemocratic Asian nationalism appears to be the ILC’s only hope, which is one reason why China is a better hope than democratic Japan or India. But that is slender hope indeed.
And here I thought Robert Musil wrote The Man Without Qualities, not Comments Without Quality. The most likely location for the ILC at this point seems to be Fermilab. There has been no serious talk, as far as I am aware, of building it in China or Japan. The way to sell the US Congress is to point out that (a) the energy frontier will have been in Europe for some time, and (b) the US tradition of particle physics experiment will be practically dead if we do not build the ILC. Appeal to the fear that the US is slipping far behind in science and technology. Talk about the technological spin-offs that come from accelerator R&D.
Sorry, I meant “no serious talk… of building it in China or India.” Japan is a possibility but does not seem likely.
In response to Robert Musil and heh, Japan is a very serious contender to host the ILC. The Japanese High Energy Physics Advisory Panel agreed that investing in R&D on the linear collider, and then hosting the machine, was the “highest priority” for HEP in this country. The government has already formed a committee to investigate funding and advise how to bring the machine here.
It goes without saying that the host nation will have to make a significant investment in the project, and as far as I am aware the Japanese government is the only one seriously prepared to pay for the privilege at the moment.
David Hefferman:
I agree that Japan is certainly a possibility as an ILC host to the extent there is any such possibility. Japan has the money and the brainpower – and in some quarters of the electorate an unfulfilled desire to show the West that Japan has “arrived,” perhaps by using ultra-expensive particle physics as a demonstration. But any such desire is uninformed atavism. Japan has nothing to prove – it “arrived” in technology and science a long, long time ago. It may be possible to politically exploit such atavism to support the ILC, but that’s a slender reed indeed.
Forming a committee to investigate funding and advise how to bring the machine to Japan is very far indeed from actually spending a major piece of $10 to $15 Billion and (probably) way up. In my opinion it is very premature to suggest that the Japanese government is seriously prepared to pay for the privilege. The Japanese High Energy Physics Advisory Panel does not make the decision as to whether the government of Japan is going to spend that kind of money on the ILC or instead on, say, a suspension bridge to some fishermen’s island that happens to lie in the district of some well connected national representative.
It would also be premature to count China out. The New York Times article to which Peter linked above points out:
“The location of today’s announcement, at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, underscores the growing role and ambition of Asia, particularly Japan and China, to become major players in high-energy physics, a field that has been dominated by the United States and Europe in the last century.”
The fact is that if China were willing to host and fund the project, there is a very good chance it would be built there. Moreover, Chinese government processes are almost completely non-transparent, so there is no way to know if senior government people might at some point latch onto the ILC as a nationalist vanity project. That would be quite consistent with many other things the Chinese government is now doing. Of course, the price tag for the ILC is pretty big compared to almost anything.
Europe, on the other hand, is extremely unlikely to host ILC with the LHC already up and running. Unlike China’s non-transparent system, the absence of any serious voiced interest from Europe tells a lot about what the Europeans are likely willing to do. If there were serious interest, some sort of response along the lines of those of Japan described by Mr. Hefferman would be in view. Nothing is in view.
What about heh’s argument that “The way to sell the US Congress is to point out that (a) the energy frontier will have been in Europe for some time, and (b) the US tradition of particle physics experiment will be practically dead if we do not build the ILC. Appeal to the fear that the US is slipping far behind in science and technology. Talk about the technological spin-offs that come from accelerator R&D.” Well, it’s hard to take this argument seriously given historical precedents. All of these arguments were made repeatedly in support of the Super Conducting Super Collider and they did not work. Nothing has changed since then for the positive.
The fact is that there are many forms of science and technology, and it is a very hard political sell to explain to the public and their elected representatives why it means much if the US “falls behind” in this particular technology – which means virtually nothing to the lives of the people writing the tax checks. Other forms of technology clearly matter to taxpayers. A few years ago the EU came together in the so-called “Lisbon Accord,” which stipulated that Europe would become the world capital of intellectual property development. Silicon Valley laughed, and the Europeans don’t talk too much about that silly accord and its ambitions now. Falling behind in that technology clearly means a lot to elected officials, as the existence of the Lisbon Accord demonstrated.
As much as I would love to see the ILC become a reality, and would gladly donate generously out of my pocket to achieve such, I do see the political baggage such a thing costs.
There really isn’t a great justification for spending those sums of money, outside of the simple answer ‘just to know more’. A lot of the claimed side effects of spawning new technology and so forth tend to be overblown. Nasa gives this line everytime they have a new plan to send people to Mars/moon/etc and after decades of this, the politicians have grown a little skeptical (justifiably so too).
You know the usual line we get at cocktail parties
‘Exactly what use is your field, and how does it benefit me?’
I now simply state ‘99% chance that it leads to absolutely no pragmatic app in our lifetime, and perhaps never’
HEP got spoiled after WWII because of the fear of the bomb & the Russians & so $$$ weren’t hard to get. There’s money for crazy stuff like Reagan-Bush-Bush Star Wars but not for basic research; and the Pentagon (Carriers, planes, etc.) always gets what it wants no matter how useless. Maybe getting across the idea that basic research is important for its own sake has to start in grade school?
But if ILC is built my guess is it will be in China. Also, a not irrelevant note: as of Nov 2006 major foreign holders of US Treasury securites (in billions): Japan 637.4, China 346.5, UK 223.5. So whatever funds the U.$. contributes will be borrowed from Japan & China.
Whether ILC proceeds or not depends on reality in the 2017 era. First, the technical case: no ILC-class machines will be built by anybody unless LHC discovers something absolutely astonishing (like the discovery of nuclear energy decades ago) that has the potential to disrupt human fundamentals, opening up a new direction, and points to major military implications.
Suppose such discovery occurs. Then the major powers will want to jump in and build the next machine to exploit it. What machine depends on what is discovered. The proposed ILC design is based on current theoritical knowledge and its projections. BUT these projections have largely been discredited in the eyes of the politicians and a sizable portion of the public. That’s why everybody’s looking for the real thing, LHC, for guidance and not theories. So if the next machine is to be built, it is very unlikely to be this ILC.
As for China, it certainly wants to participate in the next big machine but won’t insist having it on its soils. China knows it just doesn’t have the ability to build any of the sophisticated components and support systems, including computing facility. Those who can actually design and build it have the greatest say on location.
Unless there’s a dramatic change in the reputation of USA in the next decade, an ILC type machine will not be built there. The mess with the Space Station construction have just about destroy the chance of any country, even friendly ones, wanting to do such an international project again. USA is looked upon with high suspecion – everything must have a military angle, there’s the American way or the highway, unreliable funding from Congress even after treaties and contracts were signed, high-handed politics at every turn. So if US wants the next machine it on its soil, it must do it alone and take the lead on everything. But if Congress does see a justification for this huge investment, it will do it. Afterall, $20B is chump change if the politics is right. An game-changer discovery by the LHC, supported by theoritical work, will make the politics right. Otherwise, the money will continue to go to space-based instruments for fundamental physics.
By way of comparison, America spends 5 billion a year on potted plants. We can easily afford it. The tragedy is that we’d rather build mythical “missile defense” systems that don’t work (40 billion so far and counting, no end in sight) than create machines that explore the basic constituents of the universe.
Robert Musil remarked: “The problem is that even the Standard Model, with all of its vaunted (perhaps excessively vaunted) cleverness and accuracy of prediction, has not made much difference on any politically significant issue … still less to anything that a Western politician could point to as justification for spending over $10 Billion in tax money … or even a substantial portion of that inevitably-to-bloat figure. Once one moves to questions outside the Standard Model things get even flakier and harder to justify financially and politically.”
And there’s the irony. Neutrino mass is arguably outside the Standard Model. Although the SM can be fudged and fiddled to include neutrino mass, the SM never predicted it. And how was neutrino mass discovered? With a relatively dirt-cheap experiment. A big tank of cleaning fluid and some photomultipliers. No 10 billion dollar investment, no 20 mile long superconducting accelerator.
Maybe we’re better off w/o the ILC. Maybe we need to follow Rutherford’s example and experiment smarter, instead of experimenting bigger.
Many have said it before, but it bears repeating: the 3 biggest experimental results over the last 20 years didn’t come from giant accelerators. They came from a tank of cleaning fluid in a mine shaft and a couple of relatively inexpensive satellites. Maybe the glory days of the giant accelerators are past.
Dear mclaren,
the Standard Model could not “predict” the neutrino masses, any more than it allows the prediction of the mass of charged leptons or quarks. I personally think that the neutrino masses force an extension of the Standard Model more or less as revolutionary as a rearrangement of the furniture in the kids’ room forced by the arrival of a new baby.
Mind you, I am not trying to derate the significance of a measurement that we had all been waiting for, a confirmation of tens of years of chlorine experiments and helioseismology – although I believe the discovery of the top quark, just as unsurprising, was not less important -and indeed a confirmation of the Standard Model.
Anyway, I concur – maybe we do not need the ILC. And I personally hold that it won’t be built, despite the US ambitions to bring back HEP frontier experiments to their soil or Japanese or Chinese pride. That is because the LHC will, IMO, not discover anything else than a regular Higgs boson…
Cheers,
T.
“This discovery shows that it is likely that the Standard Model, proposed in the 1970s to describe the fundamental forces and particles that make up all matter, is incomplete.”
(..)
“Theoretically, neutrinos can change from one flavor to another only if they have mass. The Standard Model, however, assumes neutrinos are without mass.”
Global Team of Scientists Upends Standard Model With Discovery of Neutrino Oscillation, Mass
9 Jluy 2004
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040709082752.htm
—–
“Within the Standard Model, the neutrino has a zero mass…”
Didier Verkind, 5/20/1999
http://wwwlapp.in2p3.fr/neutrinos/ankes.html
—–
“Neutrinos are exactly massless in the Standard Model, but recent experimental observations show neutrinos oscillating between different flavors.”
Beyond the Standard Model, 2007, Glenn Elert
http://hypertextbook.com/physics/modern/beyond/
—–
“However, the Standard Model predicts that neutrinos have no mass!”
The Latest Experiments Detecting Neutrinos Suggests They Have Mass,
http://www.hep.phys.soton.ac.uk/archive/15f4.pdf
—–
I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, since in that case I would learn something.
So I’d ready and willing to believe that all of the above statements are incorrect and the SM does indeed predict a non-zero mass for neutrinos. All you have to do is prove it.
Please provide four (4) peer-reviewed journal articles showing that the SM predicted non-zero neutrino mass prior to the discovery of oscillating neutrinos. Please provide the volume number, issue number, page number, principal author and co-authors for each of the peer-reviewed HEP journal articles. Since I have cited 4 articles, you’ll need to provide 16 counter citations.
I look forward to seeing them.
mclaren,
While, before there was convincing evidence for neutrino masses, people often thought of the standard model as the model with zero neutrino masses, it was clear to everyone that adding in neutrino mass terms was a very simple extension of the model, one that experimental evidence might some day require. When this evidence appeared I don’t remember anybody being especially surprised. It’s kind of a game with language whether you want to emphasize the importance of neutrino masses (they show the standard model is wrong!), or denigrate their importance (they’re a trivial extension of the standard model!).
Ditto, better than I could have myself.
Cheers,
T.
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I don’t see how neutrino masses can be considered as part of the Standard Model, since we do not yet know what the theory of neutrino masses is.
More likely neutrino mass are of Majorana type, and give us a window at physics around 10^14 GeV. This physics might “just” be a few right-handed neutrinos: it would be less exciting than what nowadays theorists like to dream. But it is not a dream.
Otherwise, neutrino masses could be of Dirac type. While this possibility just needs a few more more Yukawa couplings, their extreme smallness and the lack of a Majorana masses makes this possibility the unlikely one: crazy new physics is needed to justify it.
The standard model doesn’t have any renormalizable operator that gives rise to a neutrino mass, but there’s a dimension five (?) operator that does so. By the usual rules of effective field theory, this operator is suppressed by the mass-scale of the new physics whatever it may be.
a,
Unless the LHC discovers something really new, I think the neutrino sector is by far the most promising place to look for new insights, but I think it confuses things to state this as “neutrino masses are not part of the standard model”. These days the standard everday model of particle physics is the version with neutrino masses, and when people refer to the “Standard Model”, that’s often what they mean. I think a better way to describe the situation is to make the point that the neutrino sector is the part of the standard model that we understand least well. We don’t know the mass matrix completely, there are lots of interesting questions about it, and answering these questions may give insights into degrees of freedom that really are completely separate from the standard model.
So, I think it’s just a question of language, with my own preference being to think of neutrino masses as the most poorly understood aspect of the Standard Model. It’s of course also accurate to insist on thinking of them as an extension of the Standard Model. Both choices of language refer to exactly the same physics and mathematics.
Peter and Aaron,
years ago QED was the theory, Fermi described radioactivity adding non-renormalizable operators suppressed by the weak scale, and this lead to the Standard Model. Today the Standard Model is the theory, we (likely) have to add non-renormalizable operators suppressed by a new scale, 10^14 GeV, and we don’t know to which new “Standard Model” this could lead.
It is true that neutrino masses were theoretically expected, but it is also true that almost all theorists expected smaller neutrino masses (suppressed by the GUT scale) and with small mixing angles. Theorists suggested “build Kamiokande to discover proton decay”, and Kamiokande discovered atmospheric neutrino oscillations with large mixing angle. This is the most recent triumph of theory.
Dear a,
neutrino masses were not just theoretically expected. They were predicted from experimental measurements of neutrino capture rates that date far back in the past. Indeed, the first chlorine experiment results to claim a deficit in solar neutrinos was Homestake in 1968.
About the reason for building super-kamiokande: I would like to read it in SK’s technical design report. I think that the discovery of neutrino oscillations was one strong motivation, no less than proton decay.
Cheers,
T.
dear Tommaso,
the name is enough: the “nde” in kamiokande stands for “nucleon decay experiment”.
About the Chlorine anomaly: ironically it started to be accepted after that it was realized how small-mixing-angle oscillations could explained it; this explains the importance of 2002 experiments, that established that it was due to large-mixing-angle oscillations.
About the top: its non-discovery would have been very important, as it is one example of those crazy things incompatible with accepted theories (including string theory, as some people like to emphasize).
Neutrino oscillations were certainly a mainstream idea many years before the discovery. At least it was so in the spring of 1981, when I gave an undergraduate seminar about the topic, in a course which nominally was about nuclear physics but was called CERN physics by the students (CERN-Physik statt Kernphysik).
Neutrino oscillations were first proposed by Bruno Pontecorvo in 1957, if I’m not wrong. They were not included in the SM at the time of its formulation simply because then there wasn’t any experimental clue as to whether neutrinos really oscillate or not
Potentecorvo 1957 paper was wrong: nu nubar oscillations don’t exist.
Anyhow there is a big difference between doing things and talking about doing things. Today we talk about supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc:, but what would be really interesting is discovering them.
Well, Yang and Mill’s 1954 paper was also wrong since isotopic gauge invariance does not exist. Isospin is just a global broken symmetry.
Wrong ideas often turn out to be the best ones. That’s why string theory might well have a bright future.
wolf:
Wrong ideas often turn out to be the best ones. That’s why string theory might well have a bright future.
That’s the best endorsement of string theory I’ve seen so far.
Tommaso;
Thanks for pointing out that nuetrino masses were theoretically predicted by at least some members of the HEP community long before neutrino oscillation was discovered. I didn’t know that. It’s always great to learn something new.
You remarked: “It’s kind of a game with language whether you want to emphasize the importance of neutrino masses (they show the standard model is wrong!), or denigrate their importance (they’re a trivial extension of the standard model!).”
I have to disagree with that claim because a number of cosmologists have suggested neutrinos with non-zero mass as the mechanism behind dark matter. While I don’t know the details on the theoretical status of this idea, and there has been a good deal of debate about the exact mechanism behind dark matter, it’s safe to say that anything that might make up 80-plus percent of the mass of the universe is not just “a game with language.” Let’s put it another way: when the SM assumed zero neutrino mass, oscillating neutrinos were out as an explanation for dark matter. When the SM was extended to include neutrino mass, that became a possible source of the missing mass. That seems like a significant difference to me. (OF course the missing mass could still be superpartners or who-knows-what-all, but the big difference there is that we have hard experimental evidence for neutrinos with mass, while to date we have no hard experimental evidence at all for superpartners.)
BTW, it’s also fair to say that whatever extensions are required to the SM to accomodate neutrino mass do seem to be minor. My point wasn’t that the SM is significantly “broken” in any way by the discovery of neutrino mass. Rather, I was trying to point out that there are areas in which the SM can be tested and in which it has to be modified, leading to potentially fruitful new physics.
Common sense would suggest that spinning out mathematical computer models of imaginary multiverses which can never be experimentally tested fails to qualify as fruitful physics.
Lessons learned?
http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw84.html
Just something which I happened to stumble upon tonight.