Throwback Thursday: What should we build after the LHC?
The most powerful accelerator in the world found the Higgs, but might not find anything else. What should come next?
“It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.” -Enrico Fermi
As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider — site of discovery of the last fundamental particle in the Standard Model, the Higgs Boson — is the most energetic particle accelerator in the history of humankind. It was shut down for more than a year as they upgraded the machine, and it now collides protons head-on with other protons at a total collision energy of 13 TeV, the most energetic collisions ever manufactured by humans on Earth.
With a radius of 1738 km around its equator, the Moon is a great place to build a particle accelerator! We’re still talking many PeVs (about 6) of energy using today’s magnet technologies, or nearly a factor of 1,000 more into the energy frontier. The formula for any proton-proton (or proton-antiproton) accelerator is simple: multiply your radius in km by your magnetic field in Tesla, then multiply the whole thing by 0.4, and you’ve got your accelerator’s maximum energy in TeV.
Think about your own dream machine; imagine building one a light-year in radius, we’d be able to test inflation and grand unified theories directly!
~~Starts with a Bang, The Medium Corporation
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