|
REPLY TO THREAD
|
|
Subject
|
7 mile hadron collider wasn't big enough...now CERN Scientists Constructing 28 Mile hadron collider...
|
|
User Name
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Font color:
Font:
|
|
|
|
|
|
Original Message
|
[link to www.independent.co.uk]
Barely five years after the Large Hadron Collider began smashing atoms together in a bid to solve the mysteries of the universe, scientists are already planning to replace it with an enormous machine four times as large.
The plans, discussed by scientists at a meeting on ‘Future Circular Colliders’ in Geneva last week, would see a super collider built around the Swiss city in a tunnel 100km long. The current collider, built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) for £6bn, started up in late 2008.
Barely a week after it became operational, several tonnes of liquid helium leaked, delaying further tests for more than a year. But it has since repaid the faith of particle physicists and last year proved the existence of the Higgs boson – the subatomic particle that gives mass to matter.
But with the Large Hadron Collider due to go out of service before 2040, there is no time to waste in planning its replacement, argued Professor Philip Burrows, senior research fellow in physics at Oxford University.
“Since the gestation time for big accelerators is a couple of decades, we need to start thinking now if we want to have a design in hand for a possible new machine to come online at Cern in the late 2030s,” he said.
Dr Rolf Heuer, the director-general of Cern, added: “We very much hope that with the LHC running at higher energy next year, we might get the first glimpse of what dark matter is. And building on that I would assume that we then can build a physics case for a future circular collider.
The new 100km Cern tunnel is one of several proposals being considered to replace the LHC, which hurls atoms against each other at virtually the speed of light
More at link
|
|
Pictures (click to insert)
|
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | | | Next Page >> |
|
