International Linear Collider Design Ready To Go

Via El Reg comes news that the International Linear Collider's Technical Design Report is finished, leaving only funding in the way of construction. From the article: "A five volume report containing the plans for the International Linear Collider has been handed over to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) for approval. The Technical Design Report contains costings for the project, along with the design of the new collider. The new machine is significantly more powerful than the hoary European Large Hadron Collider and is likely to be sited in Japan, because the Pacific island nation has reportedly offered to pay for half of the construction costs. ... Jonathan Bagger, chair of the International Linear Collider Steering Committee, said the particle collider was 'ready to go.' 'The publication of the Technical Design Report represents a major accomplishment,' he continued. ... The ILC consists of two linear accelerators facing each other. " A few years late, but hopefully not never.

Re:In Japan?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of how the LHC was supposed to be built in the US.. Then some politicians smelled pork, and fought over the location with complete disregard to the needs of the project until it became such a clustefuck the project was moved to Europe.

Progress delayed, scientific achievement and prestige denied to US academics.. All because some people wanted their pockets lined.

Re:In Japan?!

[loufoque]

Japan is paying for half the fees because having it there would be beneficial to them for obvious reasons.
Their government is willing to invest great quantities of money to bolster up their physics research sector.

Those devices are built deep underground, so there is no need to purchase that much land and effects of tectonic activity are minimal.

Not more powerful than LHC

[amazeofdeath]

The collision energies are ~10 % of LHC's. The benefit of a linear collider is that leptons like electrons and positrons can be used, making the analysis of the collisions simpler.

Re:In Japan?!

[the gnat]

You seriously think the academics were more concerned about prestige than lined pockets?

You haven't met many academic scientists, have you? A long-term job at a major research institution pays enough for a comfortable, secure, upper-middle-class 1st-world lifestyle (and equally comfortable retirement), and most scientists are entirely content with that as long as their job description basically involves geeking out over obscure theory for days on end. If they wanted to line their pockets there are far better ways to do this - the people who really care about money figure out very early that staying in academia is not the most efficient way to get rich. (One of the scientists who used to work on the project I'm on ended up at Goldman Sachs.) But some academics will do pretty nearly anything short of murder for a Nobel prize if they smell an opportunity.

Re:Relevant comment here...

[PiMuNu]

The JPARC (H- ion) linac actually has a 50 cm kink following the recent earthquake. It still works! That's why we install trim magnets...

SSC not LHC!

[Roger W Moore]

The LHC was only ever proposed at CERN using the old LEP tunnel. The US had a proposal for the SSC which had a higher energy but lower luminosity (and so had effectively the same reach at the LHC). These were two entirely different machines. My understanding is that the SSC proposal sank because US politicians moved the location to Texas for political gain. Since Texas had none of the infrastructure that places like Fermilab had this essentially doubled the cost of the project and was partly the reason for it being cancelled...but I was still a grad student in Europe around that time so I had little direct knowledge of the politics.

However one of the fall outs from the cancellation is the reason why the ILC will not get built in the US. Too many physicists around the world got burnt by US political wrangling over which they had no input or control and their grant money quite literally ended up in the hole in the ground in Texas.

Why it's linear

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to be clear: the reason it's a linear collider and not circular is for synchrotron radiation losses.

The largest circular lepton collider was LEP (the Large Electron/Positron collider, formerly housed in the now-LHC tunnel) ran at 100GeV/beam. They lost about 2% of the beam energy every turn, which has to be replenished. If you tried to build a circular collider the same circumference as LEP, but run it at the ILC energy of 250GeV/beam, you'd lose about 30% of your energy on every turn. That's not sustainable.

You could argue that you can go to a bigger-diameter ring, but once you're above 30km circumference you'll have to dig more tunnel than for the ILC anyway, so you can't win. That's why it's a linear collider.

-Scientist on the ILC team