Basic Element of the International Linear Collider design is a one-meter-long niobium cavity consisting of nine bead-shaped cells. When cooled to very low temperatures, the cavity becomes superconducting and can efficiently generate the electric fields needed to accelerate the electrons and positrons.
Image: Fermilab Visual Media Services
In Brief
- The logical successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed facility that would smash electrons and positrons together.
- The ILC’s design calls for two 11.3-kilometer-long linear accelerators that would use strong electric fields to accelerate particles through a string of vacuum chambers called cavities.
- In addition to overcoming technical challenges, the ILC’s planners must secure funding for the project and choose a site before the collider can be built.
A new era in physics will open up when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) extends the reach of subatomic particle investigations to unprecedented energy scales. But even before researchers initiate the first high-energy collisions in the LHC’s giant storage ring, located under the French-Swiss border, they are already contemplating and working toward the next great particle accelerator. And the consensus choice of the particle physics community is a proposed facility called the International Linear Collider (ILC), a machine more than 30 kilometers long that would smash electrons and positrons together at velocities very close to the speed of light. (The positron is the antimatter counterpart of the electron, identical in mass but opposite in charge.)
Far more powerful than previous electron-positron colliders, the ILC would enable physicists to follow up any groundbreaking discoveries made by the LHC. The LHC is designed to investigate the collisions of protons, each of which is actually a bundle of three quarks bound together by gluons (the particles carrying the strong nuclear force). Because the quarks and gluons within a proton are constantly interacting, a proton-proton collision is an inherently messy affair. Researchers cannot be certain of the energy of each quark at the moment of the collision, and this uncertainty makes it difficult to determine the properties of novel particles produced by the impact. But the electron and positron are fundamental particles rather than composites, so physicists working with an electron-positron collider can know the energy of each collision to great accuracy. This capability would make the ILC an extremely useful tool for precisely measuring the masses and other characteristics of newly discovered particles.
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2 Comments
Add CommentContemplating to construct yet another linear collider even before there is any significant outcome from the nascent LHC? This is incredibly mind-boggling if not utterly flabbergasting!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA 30 km machine to accelerate electron and positron to clash at near the velocity of light (c) will cost a great fortune. As a particle gets closer and closer to c, its mass will be larger and larger, and more and more energy will be required. At 99.9% c, the particle will be so massive that a huge amount of energy will have to be expended. Where will be the source of funding? Will it be at the expense of improving the life of the global needy?
Granted that the new ILC will be built and experiment carried out. Chances are someone would again argue for a newer colossal machine capable of pushing an electron to 99.99% c. And this can go on and on, a never ending game.
Just what are in the unfathomable and abysmal minds of particle physicists?
(Tan Boon Tee)
No Higgs-Boson (God Particle) at the LHC
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe key elemental particle physicists claim to exist, but which has not yet been found -- God in a Mirror? -- (Max Hadron)
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No Higgs-Boson particle today.
That Large Hadron Collider
has not been my confider.
The LHC has not yet seen the ray,
-- a glimpse of God's existence.
at 7-volt-tera'lectro-resistance.
What's found, at any rate
Some say is just a boson's mate,
Through the Atlas chambered meters
Some old neutrinos crept on...
With a leap of faith they lept-on
Like some Immaculate Concept-ion
They say the "missing energy" -- has glue on
Like when a cow jumps over the muon
Leaves a trace, an image in the mirror,
So maybe God was here.
-- Greg Molenaar, New London, Minnesota
19 April 2010
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