19
votes
CERN reveals plans for the Future Circular Collider (FCC) - almost four times longer than the current LHC
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- Title
- The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins
- Published
- Jan 16 2019
- Word count
- 341 words
Physics background here.
Colliders work by taking fast beams of charged particles, and exposing them to a strong magnetic field. This causes them to bend in circular paths, and you can then use this circular path as a "racetrack" of sorts to get them up to speed, at which you can collide two opposite-direction beams, to observe their high-energy interactions.
Due to momentum, as you speed up a particle, it will "want" to move in a straighter path, and therefore move in a wider circle. Given a certain strength of magnets available, and a certain diameter of a collider, you can therefore only speed particles up to a certain speed. Increasing diameter will then increase the speed limit of your racetrack.
The diameter required increases linearly with velocity, so quadrupling diameter results in four times the allowable speed of collision, which results in collisions with sixteen times the kinetic energy. Presumably, there will be greater gains, due to stronger magnets being available now.
So increasing the diameter will always have quadratic gains, with only linear costs (because the equipment / construction required traces the circumference of the circle).
I remember reading somewhere that there wasn't any advantage building one larger then the LHC, unless you went for something much larger such as an orbital ring collider that went all the way around the earth. One can reach higher energy levels, but I was under the impression the LHC could already manage just about any kind of collision and analysis physicists wanted to study. I also remember at the time thinking that was a strange position. Surely higher energy levels would provoke stronger reactions and therefore be more useful.
According to the article the FCC would be over seven times more powerful than the current LHC but how that impacts its effectiveness/usefulness I don't know. It would seem common-sense that there would be a non-linear relationship between size/cost and effectiveness and that you would get diminishing returns for a collider over a certain size but I'm no expert in this field.
I agree with @spctrvl though that I would have assumed that this would have cost more than they are projecting.
Apparently the LHC, construction, running, everything, was all done on a budget of only around 7 billion euros. I had no idea that these kinds of advancements in pure science were achievable on that kind of budget. Really wish we invested more into research.
I'm actually surprised it's anywhere near that cheap to build a particle accelerator that big.