This month is the 50th anniversary of the formal founding of the CERN laboratory near Geneva. There’s a very interesting article in Physics World about CERN and its future plans. LHC construction seems to be proceeding more or less on schedule, although there has been a delay in beginning to install the magnets in the tunnel due to problems with the distribution line that will provide liquid helium to the magnets.
Jos Engelen, the chief scientific officer of the lab, is quoted as wanting to see any decision about building a linear collider wait until 2010 or so. The scientific reason for this is that it may take that long to for the LHC to produce results, and the sort of linear collider one wants to build may depend upon these, e.g. on the mass of the Higgs. CERN has its own linear collider technology called “CLIC” which it is working on. CLIC is quite different than the TESLA superconducting cavity technology developed at DESY and recently endorsed by the ITRP committee charged with evaluating which technology to go ahead with. CLIC uses a second electron beam to accelerate the main beam and in principle is capable of higher accelerating gradients than TESLA. Whereas a machine using TESLA technology would probably have an energy of 500 Gev, upgradeable to 1 Tev, CLIC might be able to reach 3-5 Tev. CERN is now increasing the resources devoted to the CLIC project, and clearly hopes that a delay in the decision about whether to build the linear collider would give them time to develop and prove the viability of CLIC.
The subject of this post is experimental particle physics, so I’ll perversely take the opportunity to draw attention to two theoretical papers that I find very intriguing. I hope nobody is too annoyed; according to SPIRES-HEP neither paper has been cited by anyone but the author, who does not appear to have any academic affiliation: