CERN may sometimes build its bigger SSC

It would beat the cancelled collider in Texas

Physics World mentions a conference in Geneva that will start next Wednesday. Some important personalities will be discussing the long-term future ambitious plans of CERN.



The LHC is the small circle at the top. Its Southern "endpoint" could touch a new ring of circumference of 80-100 kilometers. Note that the SSC in Texas that was abolished in 1993 was supposed to have circumference 87.1 km so the proposed CERN collider is exactly in the same size category.

The SSC was supposed to boast energies 2 times 20 TeV (i.e. 40 TeV center-of-mass energies). However, the predictions for the same-size CERN collider sound better, around 100 TeV. This increase is due to the improvements of the magnet technologies in the last two decades. One must say that despite the absence of any "super" in the modest name of the LHC, it is using a more efficient (not just brute force) technologies to accelerate than the SSC was planned to use; and of course, the magnets are superconducting, too. The SSC was only "more super" than the LHC when it came to the size and brute force.




John Ellis is proposing some cool things such as the simultaneous existence of a LEP-plus lepton collider and a LHC-plus hadron collider in the same tunnel. Director Heuer will be attending the conference, too.




I do think that the increase of the center-of-mass energy seems to be the most promising (yet not guaranteed to produce new discoveries) strategy in experimental physics and the so-far null results of the LHC (except for the discovered Higgs boson) runs make this opinion of mine stronger, not weaker. It seems to me that the pure lepton machines are better to investigate something "we know to be there" that we want to understand in detail. But because there's "nothing new there yet", brute force increases seem kind of necessary.

Even if a precision machine found some deviation from the Standard Model, it would be so unconvincing and it would give us so little information. The deviations in Higgs boson's couplings may be due to many vastly different reasons so even if physicists became sure that there has to be new physics, they would know nothing about its character.

It is just not clear to me whether Europe will have enough money at the decisive moments, perhaps sometime before 2030. The European Parliament has just approved the Climate Suicide of Europe by 2030. The link in the previous sentence goes to the automatic translation of an essay written by a Czech center-right EU lawmaker who voted "No", of course. The insanity of the majority of the people in the EU institutions is apparently unbounded.