Implementing a linear collider facility at CERN | Hacker News Reader

Implementing a linear collider facility at CERN

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41 pointselashri6 comments

The "cold copper" accelerator technology is really neat, in my opinion. The way particle accelerators work is that they pump RF through waveguides into cavities, such that the electric field pushes on the electrons right as they enter the cavity. Historically, they've been built with geometry like cylinders and rectangles where the fields can be worked out analytically, and that can be fabricated easily. They're proposing using modern computational modeling techniques to design better cavity geometries that can then be fabricated with modern CNC techniques. That should allow more efficient accelerators and higher acceleration gradients.

I live in the area designated for the ILC (International Linear Collider) in Japan, but there has been no progress at all. The stakeholders are desperately trying to promote its benefits, but there is absolutely no understanding among the general public. The Japanese government is also not supportive at all. The country simply isn’t in a financial position to cover the several hundred billion yen needed for construction, and with rapid aging and a declining birthrate, there’s no prospect of the fiscal situation improving. Unfortunately, whether a new experimental facility can be built is more of a political issue than a scientific one, and the outlook is bleak.

It always surprises me that people do not understand that science funding is infrastructure funding. "Science" (really research) is an abstract thing and doesn't consume money. Money goes to excavation, construction, materials, machining, salaries for scientists living in the area, that sort of thing. Yes, a country will not capture all of that (any supplies purchased from overseas, for example), but those dynamics are well understood and can be mitigated.

Any government willing to fund a large infrastructure stimulus project should be willing to fund a large scientific research project. It is not just throwing money into a black hole.

(Of course, whether any kind of stimulus spending is desirable is a different question.)

Any government willing to fund a large infrastructure stimulus project should prioritize one which maximizes its utility for the tax-paying public.

Some of the infrastructure needed to support a large particle collider (roads, power generation and distribution) may be of general utility, but with current technology, most of the money will literally go into digging a "black hole" and filling it with superconducting magnets and detectors. None of that is good for anything other than particle physics (and at this point, even that is questionable; the most plausible result of a Higgs factory would be just another confirmation that yes, the standard model works, with a few new decimals tacked on to various constants).

Tangential, but, I remember reading about a recent technology that was supposed to allow building much smaller particle accelerators... does anyone have any idea what the status/applicability of that is?

It is already ongoing for the medical sector where Hadron therapy [^1] requires a small particle accelerator [^2].

The problem with particle accelerator is that, due to the synchrotron radiation [^3], there is a limit of what you can do in term of power in a small circular accelerator. The energy you loose in gamma radiation is inversely proportional to the diameter of the synchrotron.

If you want to explore high energy collisions and the unknown, you do want theoretically speaking a linear accelerator as long as possible.

There are few project world wide: The biggest one is supposed to happen in Japan with ILC. [^4]

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Hadron-therapy-facilitie...

[2]: https://www.psi.ch/en/protontherapy/the-proton-accelerator-c...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation

[4]: https://linearcollider.org/

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