International Linear Collider Design Ready To Go 71
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.
LHC is So Last-Century (Score:2)
"Four score, and several international colliders ago...."
Abraham Lincoln, Extra-Dimensional Time-Traveler
In Japan?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why build a super-expensive super-elaborate device, absolutely dependent on alignment and all that .. in a place where (1) land could hardly be less available or more expensive, (2) it tends to MOVE all the time (earthquakes, volcanoes, whatever), (3) it'll cost a bloody fortune for any visitors to visit.
Why not on some steppe somewhere, or a big flat desert (where there's at least sand for the concrete)?
Re:In Japan?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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That would be a great Kickstarter project: Help me fund half the cost of a linear collider, so they'll build it behind my shed.
You want to put the ILC behind your shed? You must have a very big backlot there...
Pacific Island Rim (Score:2)
It's necessary for them to stop the Kaiju
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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.
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You seriously think the academics were more concerned about prestige than lined pockets?
I have a ocean front bridge in Arizona to sell if you'd like, its really cheap.
Re:In Japan?! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:In Japan?! (Score:4, Interesting)
SSC not LHC! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:In Japan?! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Those devices are built deep underground, so there is no need to purchase that much land and effects of tectonic activity are minimal.
Isn't "underground" where tectonic activity takes place?
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so there is no need to purchase that much land
Buying ANY land in Japan is very expensive and building things underground doesn't save you from siesmic activity, it may infact magnify it in some circumtances.
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The Japanese have become pretty good at building stuff that is earthquake proof. I was in Tokyo when the 11/3 quake hit and there was really very little damage to buildings.
The problem with Fukushima was that it takes a long, long time for a reactor to shut down and the earthquake damaged the cooling system even before the tsunami got there. With a particle accelerator it shuts down pretty much instantly, and earthquakes take time to build up so in reality you have a few seconds for the auto-stop system to
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RTFS
protip: the "Pacific island nation" refers to Japan.
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Who said Japan is paying for half the fees? Physicists hope that Japan will stump up, but this has not been stated by anyone in authority to make such a decision. $5 bn is not small change.
Usually a nation hosting such a project pays for the infrastructures. And if you look at the costing (if I remember well from my PHD), it represents from 1/3 to 1/2 of the total cost : 40 km tunnel is quite expensive. You are right in the sense that I'm not aware of any declaration of Japan concerning the amount of their participation, but in the end that is still about what they will have to pay
Godzilla!!! (Score:2)
C'mon, we all know the real reason why Japan wants it!
Godzilla is still wandering around the bottom of the pacific plotting his revenge against Tokyo.
When they build this thing they can subject a centipede to the high radioactive flux, creating MEGA-CENTI-PEDE!
Yes, One hundred million goddamn legs! With at least one hundred friggin' lasers attached to the head.
Take THAT Godzilla!
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And who the hell wants to actually live in the middle of nowhere? Or do you think it's fully automated, including repairs?
We're not all fans of Nevada, you know?
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narrow strip = linear collider
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Plenty of land is available and inexpensive. Most of Japan is uninhabited. It's the land in _cities_ that is hugely expensive.
And any place will cost a fortune for visitors to visit.
Planetary defense network (Score:2)
Don't listen to the propaganda, this is the first of a large installation of spaceship-killing ion cannons which will ring the globe, protecting us from aliens.
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No, no silly, Everyone knows, Ion Cannons go IN space. How else can you blast NOD on the ground?
Not more powerful than LHC (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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IANAP, but the Wiki article on linacs sez that the advantage of a linear accelerator is that you can use bigger, heavier ions since there's no need to continually accelerate them just to keep them in a circle. That energy is sometimes given off as synchrotron radiation, which would be wasted.
Another bonus: now that we know where to looking for the Higgs, we can make it for a lot less energy. The LHC needed extra power to make the Higgs in particular ways that left an easily-noticeable signal (in particle ph
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now that we know where to looking for the Higgs
Sorry you large English problem. Didn't we find the Higgs a few months ago?
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now that we know where to looking for the Higgs
Sorry you large English problem. Didn't we find the Higgs a few months ago?
A scientific discovery is not a binary issue. I'm not 100% convinced that the Higgs has been found, but I'm pretty sure some new physics was found, Higgs or not. We need to do more experiments in the same range to find out more about what it is we actually found, so to me the GP makes sense. (IAAP.)
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Linacs are better because they can use singular particles (like electrons) as well, which means for 33% of the power, you can still achieve per-particle collision energies on the same sort of scale as the LHC (i.e. smash 2 electrons, rather then 2 balls of 3 quarks each).
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Linacs are better because they can use singular particles (like electrons) as well
Circular accelerator can use electrons too, in fact there is plenty of accelerator which use different type of particules at the same time (most of the pre-accelerator of the LHC such as the PS and the SPS accelerate electron, positrons, protrons and heavy ions in a seconds timescale)
Re:Not more powerful than LHC (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The LHC's predecessor was the "Large Electron Positron" collider, so that's not a particular reason to use a linear accelerator.
Lepton accelerators do have an advantage over baryon colliders in that leptons are (as far as we can tell) indivisible; if you smash two leptons together with X amount of energy each, you get a collision of energy 2X. With baryons, the energy of each is mostly divided up between their three constituent quarks. Colliding two baryons usually results in a collision between one quark from each, so your collisions only use about 1/3 of the energy that was put in.
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The LHC's predecessor was the "Large Electron Positron" collider, so that's not a particular reason to use a linear accelerator.
Yes the LEP was the predecessor of the LHC (in fact LHC is in the very same tunnel LEP was), but LEP was at much lower energy (120MeV) than the LHC (6TeV) or what would be the ILC (1TeV). LEP was at the limit of the energy "reasonably" achievable for a circular lepton collider, because energy is lost by synchrotron radiation in circular accelerator. The LHC as a hardron collider is not really affected by this, but to get to the energy of the ILC, an linear accelerator was needed. The main paradigm in high e
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Relevant comment here... (Score:2)
The one issue I'd have with locating it in Japan is, of course, earthquakes. This is going to be *how* long... and the alignment is how many zeros to the right of the decimal point? All of which would suggest frequent shutdowns to re-align, and that's assuming no *major* earthquakes.
mark
Re:Relevant comment here... (Score:4, Informative)
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Japan is far from the ideal place to construct such a machi
Leaving only funding in the way (Score:1)
...
That is pretty much the story of most things in my life that I wanted to do but couldn't.
Funding is generally the most important part, and when you leave it to last, it shows something about your management ability. Something about putting the cart before the horse comes to mind.
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If you came to someone for funding with no plan, what would they say?
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Funding is generally the most important part, and when you leave it to last, it shows something about your management ability. Something about putting the cart before the horse comes to mind.
This how all the big science project I heard about works. If you wait a politician to say "I have a few billion left and I don't know what to do with it, let's make a kick ass science experiment !" you may wait for long long time ....
Also politics don't know shit about science, (as they know nothing about technology in general), it would be the best way to get useless (in the sense not scientificly necessary) experiment to be built.
Wrong Link (Score:2)
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Ready, Set, Go! (Score:2)
The guy a few articles down who just finished the ATLAS detector in Lego bricks now has his new project.
Why it's linear (Score:4, Informative)
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