We cannot lose, not with a machine like this.” Even if we don’t see new physics, that is still a breakthrough. “When we do this kind of big exploration, we always learn new things. “We need to go significantly beyond what we can do today,” says Markus Klute, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This proposed collider would connect to CERN’s pre-existing accelerator complex, pass under nearby Lake Geneva and then encircle the Salève mountain. This time, they went big, discussing a 100-TeV circular proton collider to be built in a new subterranean tunnel between 80 and 100 kilometers (50 and 62 miles) long. “That was not the purpose of the workshop.”įour years later, the physicists took the lessons they learned in Malta and hosted another workshop: The Future Circular Collider Study Kickoff Meeting, held at the University of Geneva. “It came out accidentally,” Zimmermann says. How could we justify spending billions of Swiss Francs on a project that would be ‘nice’ for physics?”Īfter many hours of debate, the participants came to a new realization: If they wanted the next accelerator to be worth it, they needed a bigger tunnel. “For me this was a clear ‘no go’ message. “Basically, the prominent physicist said, ‘Doubling the LHC energy would be nice!’” “We asked a very prominent theoretical physicist to give us a talk, which was supposed to motivate and excite us,” CERN scientist Steve Myers wrote in the scientific journal Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.Īccording to the presentation, the maximum energy another 17-mile accelerator could achieve was double the LHC’s design value: from 14 to 30 TeV. The question that so dominated the workshop participants’ time: What next-generation accelerator should they build in CERN’s 17-mile subterranean tunnel once the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider were complete? The answer was not obvious. “The Russians were swimming in the ocean after midnight. But “we were picked up by a bus early in the morning, and then dropped back at the hotel late at night,” says Frank Zimmermann, an accelerator physicist at CERN. The workshop was held in Malta, a Mediterranean island country and tourist destination south of Italy. Not the international 2010 High-Energy LHC Workshop. Most scientific conferences balance serious physics discussions with at least some amount of leisure time.
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