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Science

CERN Makes Bold Push To Build $23.5 Billion Super-Collider (nature.com) 68

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the frontier of high-energy physics. From a report: The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan's approval by an independent panel in March. Europe's preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least $23.5 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab's famed Large Hadron Collider. The new machine would collide electrons with their antimatter partners, positrons, by the middle of the century. The design -- to be built in an underground tunnel near CERN's location in Geneva, Switzerland -- will enable physicists to study the properties of the Higgs boson and, later, to host an even more powerful machine that will collide protons and last well into the second half of the century. The approval is not yet a final go-ahead. But it means CERN can now put substantial effort into designing a collider and researching its feasibility, while pushing to the backburner research and development efforts for alternative designs for LHC follow-ups, such as a linear eletron-positron collider or one that would accelerate muons. "I think it's a historic day for CERN and particle physics, in Europe and beyond," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti told the council after the vote.
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CERN Makes Bold Push To Build $23.5 Billion Super-Collider More

CERN Makes Bold Push To Build $23.5 Billion Super-Collider

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  • Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to put an array of satellites in space that shoot beams of particles at each other? This would make a loop bigger than the whole planet. There would be no need to evacuate the air, and they could use gravity instead of magnetism to make the particles go around the loop. (Obviously, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I figure asking a stupid question is a good way to start learning.)
    • The loop itself is a fair bit of the cost IIRC, but the supporting equipment costs billions as well. And some of it weighs quite a bit. Lofting all that into space doesn't make much financial sense, and once it is up there you really can't easily expand, reconfigure or repair anymore.

    • The sensor systems that catch the data about the collisions are huge and very heavy. I don't suppose those would be easy to put up there. Also I guess they have a much harder vacuum in CERN than the one in near space so you would have to go a long way away to build your loop. Plus they use a huge amount of electricity to accelerate the particles so solar panels won't do and you'll have to push up some pretty big nuclear power plants to run the system.

      Based on that my guess is no. Might be some interest

    • Probably not (Score:4, Informative)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:03PM (#60203166)

      If you see how the LHC is built, it's a giant magnetic ring. You have to keep the particles under constant magnetic containment, otherwise they fly off everywhere. Also, it would have to be *way* the heck out in space to get away from the Earth's magnetic field.

      • The charged particles aren’t kept under constant containment [cds.cern.ch]. In fact, the majority of the magnets are dipoles used to bend the beam, a vast minority spaced rather far apart are used for focusing or special purposes. Large areas are resonating RF chambers used to help the electric fields accelerate the particles. There is no reason you couldn’t build one in space in principle, with larger gaps between the elements, it’s just the engineering challenges would be much harder on all levels

        • The beam isn't kept confined all the way around. Energy generation would probably be an issue. Cooling would still be an issue, as space is cold, there is no matter to draw heat away from hot things, so hot things tend to stay hot for a long period of time.

          • Superconduction generates no heat, and while radiative heat transfer is proportional to the fourth power, if you can shade from the sun, space is quite cold and with the right radiators objects can be kept cool with much less energy expenditure than on earth. Energy generation and thrust (to keep alignment and to counter the beam deflection) would be pretty major hurdles for sure.
    • No, the cooling may be cheaper if you can keep it shaded, and vacuum would easier to maintain, but you would need a very large number of large satellites each with a vast power source and ability to use large amounts of thrust over long periods of time to keep them aligned.

    • they could use gravity instead of magnetism to make the particles go around the loop.

      Gravity would not be able to contain anything that is going faster than Earth's escape velocity. This is 40,270 km/h at Earth's surface, which is about 1/18,000 of the speed of light - which is what these particles travel at.

      Other issues: there will still need to be a vacuum tube for the particles, this will need electromagnets to control & focus the beams. Keeping this from twisting in space will be hard: pushed by solar radiation, heated by the sun, earth's magnetic fields will bend it, ... Hard, but

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well to put it into context, $23bn is 1/5th what it is costing the UK to build about 300 miles of last gen railway and trains to go on it, so it's a bargain frankly.

      Sending shit into space to build a massive space construct and avoiding space debris and getting data/too from sounds a whole lot more expensive than that.

    • Putting it in space would eliminate the vacuum chamber but would make a lot of other things more expensive. There are strong magnets along much of the length of the beamline, and they have to be maintained in pretty precise alignment (sub millimeter, maybe much better). There are also substantial electrical power and cooling requirements.

      Unfortunately earths gravity isn't enough to bend the beams much. The particles are very near the speed of light, so they bend a lot like the way light would bend - which

      • How about a circumlunar collider? Think of a magnetized confinement tube supported on piers just above the surface, in whichever route would require the least amount of tunneling through the top of crater walls and mountain ranges, and would take advantage of the fractional lunar gravity - precise alignment for less. Because no build of such a supercollider would be ready until the last quarter of the century anyway, lunar construction could by then be largely automated and could take advantage of local man

        • Still has the cost issue with anything in space. (much as I wish we could - I'd certainly go back to working on colliders if I thought I could wrangle a trip to the moon out of it....)

          I suspect the moon collapsing into a black hole would have um... substantial negative consequences for the earth, as something on the order of a few percent of its mass energy was released in a millisecond.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by neoRUR ( 674398 )

            What about putting a satellite in geo sync orbit system in space that will shoot it straight down to earth to some sensors and stuff. Like a big laser beam with particles.

            • Still have to put the big accelerator in space.

              Also, you need to collide particles with each other, not a fixed target. The particle energy is on the order of 1 TeV, 1000X the mass of a proton . If it hit a proton, it would be like throwing a bowling ball at a ping pong ball - the light ping pong ball would just bounce away, having absorbed very little of the bowling ball's energy.

              You nee to smash bowling balls into each other - so need colliding beams.

          • What substantial negative consequences? Tides and the Moon's anchoring effect on Earthly precession would be unaffected. The downsides would be no more pretty eclipses, and the need to post warning beacons near the object so ships don't blunder into it and be eaten.

            • That and 7X10^22 KG converted partially to energy. Say 1% ,or about 1e21kg. X C^2. So 1e38 Joules. at 3e8M distance. or about 1e21J/M^2.

              About a million megatons per square meter/ One-million sun block is not going to save you this time.

              Jupiter and the other gas giants would probably survive.

              Things collapsing into black holes typically don't go quietly. Hyper-novae are likely black hole core collapses of stars.

    • Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to put an array of satellites in space that shoot beams of particles at each other?

      That would be a good way to shoot particles at each other at a fixed speed, but at that point you may as well put both satellites on the ground with the tips touching and pull the trigger at the same time. It would achieve the same affect.

      A particle accelerator is in the name. They aren't firing something down an empty tube, they are continuously pushing it faster and faster accelerating it continuously the further it travels.

      • Yep. A particle accelerator is like a HUG rail-gun where the bullets are particles. The only reason it is bent into a circle is because otherwise it would have to be much, much longer to accerlate the particles enough. The particles go around the circle, being continuously accelkerated, much like a bullet/maglev train is accelerated and propelled by magnets on the "track" continuously pulling and pushing on magnets on the bottom of the train, but, the "magnets" on the train car, are the particles themselves

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dastardly ( 4204 )

      One reason their is a big loop is to accelerate the particles to huge speeds/energy as they zip around the loop. With satellites there would be no acceleration between satellites.

      Part of the reason bigger loops are needed for bigger energies is that we are talking about charged particles. A charged particle at a constant velocity in a circular path is accelerating and an accelerating charged particle emits energy. The tighter the loop at a given speed the greater the acceleration and the greater the energy

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Colliders aren't big because they want to shoot particles long distances. The point is to accelerate the particles using electric and magnetic fields, for which you need equipment alongside the beam. All that stuff would be very expensive to build in space, and really the only benefit you'd get would be not having to work so hard to keep a vacuum.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )
      Another minor issue is that the CERN large hadron collider generates MASSIVE amounts of data: over 90 million gigabytes of data per year, but more importantly it is made up of very large amounts of data generated over very short time periods. CERN has insane amounts of fiber cabling and hundreds of petabytes worth of file storage servers.

      Satellites wouldn't have the bandwidth to sent all of it in real-time, and the costs to store and process it all in orbit would likely be astronomical.

  • last well into the second half of the century.

    Assuming there's still a society.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sabri ( 584428 )
      Hopefully it will be one where "kilometre" is written in a normal way, you know, like how you pronounce it: kilometer.

      Effing Brits and their stupid writing. Fibre, Kilometre. Colour. Sod off.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        A meter is how you measure a metre.

        It's not difficult.

        • Apparently it is if you are American.
          They don't seem to realise that these little idiosyncrasies are because English is actually a mish mash of other languages (as are most languages I suppose).
          Metre - from the French unit mètre, from the Greek noun , "measure".
          I suppose some day they will prepend that with "Meter, from the old English word Metre"....
          and may God have mercy on our souls.

  • We really need this. (Score:5, Funny)

    by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:02PM (#60203156)
    Not only will it push the frontier of testing the standard model, but name is statistically less likely to yield embarrassing spelling mistakes [google.com] that fellow scientists never let slide and rib those unfortunate souls for eternity.
  • The birds will be back with their baguettes. https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
  • Will cost more than $25B, especially if the right people get in power?
    I wanted to study particle physics at SUNY StonyBrook in 1980. At that time, the US was on the verge of losing its status as the premiere place to do particle physics. I think the Brookehaven National Labs put out a propsal for the next generation particle collider called Isabelle (nicknamed Wasabella afterwards). I remember that at that time, that the proposal was lost. I remember that there was a strong proposal within the scientif

    • Lately, I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson talk about his biggest surprise in the scientific community where he brought up this observation (the USA giving up on particle physics) and how the anti-intellectuals were taking over, especially the Southern Evangelicals and their Intelligent Design Curriculum, especially the initiative to downplay the role of evolution in high school biology books.

      This formal False Dichotomy "science versus religion" irrelevant scapegoating never gets old, does it?

      No, if it isn't funded, it will be due to cost, which for any given point of knowledge or scientific achievement, drops to a tenth of the cost simply by waiting. But, naturally, people, including scientists, want that paycheck -now-.

    • how the anti-intellectuals were taking over, especially the Southern Evangelicals and their Intelligent Design Curriculum, especially the initiative to downplay the role of evolution in high school biology books.

      The evangelical creationist anti-intellectuals are not the anti-intellectuals actually sabotaging construction equipment and filing endless lawsuits preventing pure science from being done:
      https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.... [hcn.org]

      How sad is it that our only hope for progress in some places will be a big enough Covid-19 spike?

  • She explained very well why yet-another-bigger-collider does not seem to be a good investment at this time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    There are lots of other physical experiments that one can invest money into, and many of them promise much more new insight than a bigger collider.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Unless the XENON finding turns out to be real. If it is, it suggests new physics just past the LHC. Making a big electron-positron collider is also at least a step in the direction she suggests: high precision, low(er) energy experiments. We could potentially learn quite a bit by building a high precision Higgs factory.

  • Waxahachie, Texas? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We already have a partial built collider here. Why not finish this one instead???
    • It's probably rubble by now
    • I curse the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider when I hear news stories like this. We could have made those discoveries decades before CERN and been leading the field with our big ring. Instead, Congress killed it for being over budget. Like that never happened to a large project. Guess Texas just didn't want to spend the juice to keep it going. Just imagine what could be done with today's magnets and that large a circle...
  • We can't afford devoting billions just to see if something pops up at higher energies. Without theoretical guidance, this is a fool's errand, and a scandal, for there are lots of promising scientific projects (physics ones too) waiting to get funding. Until somebody comes up with specific predictions of events at higher energies than can be reached by LHC, no money should be devoted to another accelerator - maybe supersymmetry is around the corner, but maybe supersymmetry does not exist in nature.

    • There is all kinds of theoretical guidance in the form of theories that exist today that need to be either confirmed or ruled-out. To do this requires these energy levels because these are the energy levels that these theories predict you'll see the effects they are predicting. This would be building and experiment to test the theories that are otherwise untestable.

      Pick up a book. You might actually learn something.

  • We need it (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @04:53PM (#60203758)

    We definitely need this, but not at the expense of ITER. We need to make sure ITER is built.

  • Let's say you have a problem with your car, you call a mechanic and they come and check it out, they then say: I think the problem is X and it will cost you a 100$. You pay them money and the mechanic then comes back and says, I couldn't find the problem, I'll need 200$, I don't know if I can find the problem. Would you pay that?

    Physicists are increasingly building larger and more expensive detectors because they don't understand the standard model. They found the last remaining problem, all of the other t

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Well they can have my €28 right now, I only need their payment info, if there is even a chsnse that this finally clears up the multiple competing theories on how to unify quantum mechanics and general relatively It’ll be a good thing, Knolage is seldom cheap but allwas wothwile,I might not have the required knowledge to appreciate it, but hay there are a lot of people way moreknowlageble and smarter then me, if this can help them...
  • Just a small step for particlekind. Eventually, CERN's plan is to build a 40,000 km ultrasupermfcollider that will use the entire output of earth's electricity to smash particles together in order to prove that in fact there is no intelligent life in the universe, including on earth.
  • As a taxpayer, I could agree with this on one condition: https://ko-fi.com/post/An-exam... [ko-fi.com]

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