Another good news for high-energy physics: the United States intend to build a new circular proton-proton collider. The plan is to use the existing tunnel in Waxahachie, Texas that was constructed for the SSC collider project canceled in 1993. Thanks to the recent progress in superconducting magnet technology, the new machine, dubbed the NSSC, will be able to reach a much larger center-of-mass energy than originally planned for the SSC. The pre-TDR document released today quotes 80 TeV collision energy with possible upgrades to 100 TeV, which would put it on par with the similar project at CERN. The decision was first announced at the HEPAP meeting two weeks ago and today the news article was posted on the DOE web site. The article quotes Ernest Moniz, the US Secretary of Energy, "We have all we need: the technology, the know-how, and even the tunnel, so it's only natural that we're going to do it". This move may be surprising, given the recent funding cuts on fundamental research. One can speculate that some big politics must be involved. The decision seems to be a response to the quickly advancing plans of building a new high energy collider in China. Apparently, losing the scientific leadership to China would be a too bitter pill to swallow.
Update: This post is obviously an April Fools' joke: the SSC won't be back no more. But the Chinese thingy may well be for real. The way the wind is blowing, we should start learning Mandarin...
Nice one... April is my favorite month!
ReplyDeleteIs that Chinese thing for real? The slides certainly don't look too strange.
ReplyDeleteBetter keep your day job... you aren't going to cut it as a comedian
ReplyDeleteExcellent news. I also heard that US theory has plans to abandon strings, anthropic, self-promotion, mathematical games and to return doing physics.
ReplyDeleteWhile it would be great to discover something at the NSSC, not finding anything new will be an even greater achievement said US officials.
ReplyDeleteHowever most theorists expect that supersymmetric partners will be found by NSSC, unless they are just a bit heavier, which they agree off the record is really the case. However a future 300 TeV collider would find particles that are three times heavier than NSSC thresholds, since as per Einstein's theory mass and energy are interchangeable. Not finding anything at the 300 TeV collider will be an even bigger achievement and the race is on!
"The chances of not find anything get brighter and brighter as we move up the energy scale, making the building of larger and larger machines a no-brainer," said Mina Akrani Ahmed.
CERN does not want to remain behind US:
ReplyDeletehttp://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/04/cern-switch-comic-sans
If at all,there is going to be ,somewhere, only one 100 TeV--scale accelerator.
ReplyDeleteBoth in US,China and elsewhere ,there are other much more critical issues to deal with first.In addition,China has available extra cash resources,US doesn't(without seriously damaging some other essential needs).
Besides,there probably will be progress in developing or using other sources like wake-acceleration,the universe(primordial radiation),etc
Abraham
This is the first blog which I have to see on every April 1.
ReplyDeleteSadly enough this is such an unlikely headline that I immediately recognized the joke - even before noticing the date. I think it would have taken me longer to get "100 TeV collider to be built in India".
ReplyDeleteHopefully they'll stick with the plan because CERN will build more powerful machine.
ReplyDeleteThe US has a collided gap problem
ReplyDeleteThis is a very evil April Fool's joke. ;)
ReplyDeleteRather bitter than evil :)
ReplyDeleteI am surprised that everyone missed the announcement from Chinese govt that they are proposing to build an accelerator much bigger than solar system to reach an energy of 10^16 GeV. They say they have to do better than BICEP2.They cannot allow western imperialists to dominate high energy physics!
ReplyDeleteWhen we are small we use to play April fool.....funny april.
ReplyDeleteNo plot of the week anymore?
ReplyDeleteWaw... Nice.. April is my favorite month!
ReplyDelete