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Which machine will replace the large hadron collider to deepen our knowledge of fundamental physics at the high-energy frontier in the coming decades?
The question is not at all far-fetched: the construction of these large machines requires two decades – and can then be exploited for two more decades, amassing collision data that slowly but steadily improves the accuracy of our estimates of the parameters of nature .
Of course, some people think that the absence of new indications on physics in the LHC data should prompt us to suspend our future programs. The argument could be: "Let's wait to see if we gain more understanding in other related fields – neutrinos, astroparticle physics, etc. – and get clues that new physics is hiding on a scale. slightly higher energy needs to tackle the problem in a radically different way – then we can make an informed decision about what to build or what kind of R & D to undertake. "
I think it's a reasonable point of view, but I think it would be very dangerous to stop a whole field of research, when the investments needed to keep it alive do not represent that a small fraction of the money needed to do our business space research – or to fund a week of military spending in the Middle East countries, from elsewhere.
No: I think we need to use the technological breakthroughs we now have to go one step further and open new physics investigations at smaller distances. We currently think that quarks and leptons are point particles, but if we "light" them with high-energy probes, we may be able to see the first clues of their structure – that would be a huge step forward. In reality, the argument is that we have to do it, Because we can.
Among the various new colliders proposed (CLIC, ILC, FCC-ee, a muon collider, among others), the Chinese project of a high energy electron-positron collider, the CEPC, now appears as he who progresses more regularly to become a thing.
A design report has now been submitted. It includes two very large and detailed volumes that explain the range of the accelerator, the detector and the physics. You can consult them on the CRC website. For the reading in question, here is a link (a screenshot is shown below) to a very nice video that shows the project in detail and explains how the acceleration of electrons and positrons would unfold. Look!
Above: A beam of positrons (the reddish spot) has just been created by the interaction of electrons with a target, leaving behind a flash of bluish light.
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Tommaso Dorigo is an experimental particle physicist who works for the INFN of the University of Padua and collaborates on the CMS experiment at CERN's LHC. He coordinates the AMVA4NewPhysics European network as well as accelerator-based physics research for INFN-Padova. He is also editor of the journal Reviews in Physics. In 2016, Dorigo published the book "Anomaly! Physics of colliders and search for new phenomena at Fermilab ". You can get a copy of the book on Amazon.
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