Physicists Plan to Build a Bigger LHC 263
ananyo writes "When Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, particle physicists would not have dreamt of asking for something bigger until they got their US$5-billion machine to work. But with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC has fulfilled its original promise — and physicists are beginning to get excited about designing a machine that might one day succeed it: the Very Large Hadron Collider. The giant machine would dwarf all of its predecessors (see 'Lord of the rings'). It would collide protons at energies around 100 TeV, compared with the planned 14TeV of the LHC at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. And it would require a tunnel 80-100 kilometres around, compared with the LHC's 27-km circumference. For the past decade or so, there has been little research money available worldwide to develop the concept. But this summer, at the Snowmass meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota — where hundreds of particle physicists assembled to dream up machines for their field's long-term future — the VLHC concept stood out as a favorite."
Re:Peanuts (Score:4, Insightful)
The trouble is that VLHC does not enrich the friends of the politicans and so will not be looked on favourably.
Oh, yea of little faith. I'm fairly certain anything that involves land acquisition and construction contracts will benefit SOME politician somewhere.
I'd rather the money go for a Mars mission. (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean particle physics is cool, but it doesn't do anything for the human spirit of exploration like a mission to Mars would.
Re:Peanuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly its not that simple. Imagine lab "A" says they have a design they can build for 10B and lab "B" says it will cost $11B - and assume both labs have similar good reputations for building large projects. "A" gets the project and that means they get funded for the next ~15 years. Lab B gets downsized or even shut down because the high energy physics money is going to lab A. If the project works -great. But if not, and Lab A has put in an unreasonably low estimate at least they still exist, and after 15 years many of the managers responsible have retired.
Now say 15 years later the $10B has been spent, but its not quite done, another $2B would let you finish the project. Do you really throw away $10B to save 2B? There is no fraud, just a mis-estimation of the costs of building a beyond state-of-the-art machine and slightly larger technical problems than were expected.
What happens is that you create a very strong motivation for under-estimates because that at least keeps the lab alive. Combine that with the difficulty of estimating the cost of something that hasn't been done yet, and a long enough project timescale that changing economic conditions can substantially change labor and construction costs. This is why many projects like this go over budget.
I don't think this is unique to government. I suspect that Boeing doesn't do a good job of estimating the development cost of a new airliner either - and that is much less of a technological extrapolation than the high energy physics machines.
Re:Peanuts (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure I saw George Bush on the news last week, alive and well...
>and removed a shit ton of weapons of mass destruction from the world
the US military would have restocked all the weapons of mass destruction ** used in Iraq by now.
** the Boston bomber was charged with having a weapon of mass destruction, so anything pressure cooker size and up must be one
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't yet know. Isn't that terribly exciting? That is basic research at its finest.
Re: Call it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Big ass distractin from fusion research
I mean, the LHC was a neat project, but what practical benefits to humanity have come from it? Knowledge is great, but the Higg's discovery isn't solving the problems the world faces.
I know money and research into our energy needs could come from lots of places, but when I see massive facility of extreme high tech, employing thousands of physicists and researchers with international funding and support, and Billions of dollars budget, I can't help but think a similar problem with much greater utility is being neglected to all of our detriment.
Re:Dallas? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are also ideas to build a circular muon collider. Muons are similar to electrons so give a nice clean signal in the detectors, but being 200 times heavier than electrons they lose much less energy as they circulate around a ring-shaped path.
The problem is muons are unstable, with a half-life of just 2 micro-seconds. But if you can collect them fast enough and accelerate them to near-light-speed, their lifetime increases due to time dilation. The nearer they get to light-speed the longer they last for, and it's thought that it would be feasible to get them going fast enough that they would last for a useful amount of time.
There are lots of advantages to circular accelerators: You can re-use the expensive accelerating sections thousands of times over by recirculating the beam; the beam itself is re-used over and over (only a tiny fraction of the particle are lost on each collision); and most importantly you can install more than one detector. Having two independent measurements is very important in establishing the reliability of any results.
Re: Call it... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's possible to do both. Besides, if your plan is "fusion at all costs", don't forget that the science involved (like computational techniques, materials science, etc...) are often cross-pollinated between the different fields.
ITER is being built in France as we speak. Construction on this hypothetical vlhc would start in the 2030s, if it happens at all.