The ILC in one minute flat
July 22, 2010 | 3:27 pm
The folks working on the proposed International Linear Collider have created a one-minute animation that flies you through its 30-kilometer-long tunnel. It has no sound, but the visuals speak for themselves: Electrons and positrons are generated on opposite arms of the collider, circle in opposite directions in a damping ring, fly out to the ends of the machine and jet back into the middle, where they collide. For more details about the humongous project – which is scheduled to present a progress report at the International Conference on High Energy Physics on Saturday – go here.
Glennda Chui
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3 Comments »
July 22nd, 2010 at 4:45 pm
The video’s nice, but I haven’t found anything on the site that explains why it’s worth building a 0.5TeV collider now the 7TeV LHC is online. What are the advantages of this over the LHC?
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:27 pm
There are a couple of reasons why the ILC does science that the LHC can’t. It’s definitely not just about energy!
The LHC’s eventual 14 TeV collisions have their energy spread among all the constituent parts of the colliding protons. The typical collisions of one quark from one proton and another quark from another (or a gluon from one of them) involves only a fraction of the particle and therefore a fraction of the 14 TeV.
In contrast, the energy of collisions in the ILC would entirely go to the products and so the energy reach is actually comparable.
In addition the types of collisions that you would see in the ILC are different from those in the LHC. LHC collisions are, in some sense, messy because of all the parts of the protons flying around. ILC collisions would be between particles that are elementary objects, not composites, so the collisions are “cleaner”.
I’d suggest you take dig through the following two documents:
Discovering the Quantum Universe: http://www.interactions.org/quantumuniverse/
and
Gateway to the Quantum Universe:
http://www.linearcollider.org/gateway/
They have a bunch of information about what the different colliders would do and how they would together help answer the fundamental questions in particle physics.
July 23rd, 2010 at 12:09 am
That’s very helpful, thanks very much!