[HN Gopher] C3: A "cool" route to the Higgs boson and beyond
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C3: A "cool" route to the Higgs boson and beyond
Author : noslenwerdna
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-11-01 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| knzhou wrote:
| This is a new proposal, fresh on the arXiv today, from a group of
| U.S. particle physicists. The introduction is very readable and
| lays out the mission clearly:
|
| > We can now confidently claim that the "Standard Model" of
| particle physics (SM) is established. At the same time, we are
| more and more strongly persuaded that this SM is incomplete.
| [...] It is now common to describe the SM as an "effective"
| theory that should be derived from some more fundamental theory
| at higher energies. But we have almost no evidence on the
| properties of that theory.
|
| > Our successes have become a liability in reaching this goal.
| Scientists from other fields now have the impression that
| particle physics is a finished subject. They question our
| motivations to go on to explore still higher energies. The scale
| of an energy frontier collider is also challenging to the young
| people in our field. They need to see qualitatively new
| capabilities realized during their active scientific careers.
| [...] That is where the urgency lies.
|
| > [T]he entire C3 program could be sited in the United States.
| With the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider and
| the end of Tevatron operations the US has largely abandoned
| construction of domestic accelerators at the energy frontier. C3
| offers the opportunity to realize an affordable energy frontier
| facility in the US. This may be crucial to realize a Higgs
| factory in the near term, and it will also position the US to
| lead the drive to the next, higher energy stage of exploration.
|
| The main innovation is that they propose to use non-
| superconducting cavities, which allow much higher accelerating
| fields, cooled to increase their quality factor. The resulting
| shorter length dramatically decreases the cost, to an estimated
| $4 billion, which is 80% to 90% less than other proposals. Of
| course, $4 billion is no small amount of money, but for
| perspective that's about equal to the monthly budget of the
| National Institutes of Health, a third of the cost of the James
| Webb Space Telescope, or 2% of the total cost of the space
| shuttle.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Where are we at with femtosecond laser driven accelerators? It
| seemed like there were promises of table-top accelerators in
| the near future.
| milliams wrote:
| Could the title be changed to:
|
| C3: A "Cool" Route to the Higgs Boson and Beyond
| drfuchs wrote:
| Or at least corrected to $C^3$, though downloading the source
| file shows:
|
| \def\CCC{C$^{3}$~}
| blowski wrote:
| I will confess I thought someone was using Excel to look for
| it.
| dang wrote:
| Sure. Done.
| ISL wrote:
| Generally when papers like this come out, there are a couple of
| decades' history behind them.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm an experimental physicist, but don't have domain
| knowledge in the subtleties of modern accelerator-cavity design,
| which is both an art and a science. Most modern accelerators,
| including LHC, are driven with superconducting niobium cavities.)
|
| Since essentially every author is at SLAC, I suspect that there
| is a strong cold-copper research group there.
|
| Can anyone with domain-knowledge summarize the generally-accepted
| strengths/weaknesses/risks of cold-copper accelerator designs?
| potiuper wrote:
| Should try convincing the Saudis to bankroll it and put it under
| the 100 mile long line city; add it as part of the tourist
| attraction. China could throw in some money too to get more time
| as the Saudis would be more neutral to them than Japan.
| avz wrote:
| The paper describes a design for a linear accelerator that would
| reach 250GeV in center of mass frame and that may be extended to
| 550GeV (see section 2) and even multi-TeV (see section 5).
|
| I was curious how this compares against LHC which Wikipedia [1]
| says reached record 13TeV total collision energy. However, it
| isn't clear whether Wikipedia cites energy in center of mass
| frame that could be directly compared.
|
| Does anyone know how the two accelerators would compare in this
| respect? In particular, would the proposed C3 accelerator
| actually achieve higher total collision energy than LHC or is it
| instead hoped that future extensions of a C3 accelerator would
| exceed LHC's capabilities?
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
| tambourine_man wrote:
| "with a compact 8 km footprint"
| chroem- wrote:
| Has the LHC produced technological advances that are used outside
| of particle physics? I am struggling to think of any.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| It has created a ton of jobs for instrumentation engineers and
| PhDs. It has also brought many economic benefits to
| Switzerland.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I have no direct insight, but from what I gather, the amount of
| data generated there is staggering (1 petabyte/second raw, 1
| petabyte/day after filtering). Storing and processing this much
| data certainly required immense technological advances (which
| have been shared with the community at large). Again, my
| impression from far outside.
|
| But fundamental research like this does not have short-term
| prosperity or technological breakthroughs as main priority
| anyway, so I'm not sure why you're so concerned about that.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Is it not the case that a lot of machine learning research was
| done to make the data processing at LHC possible?
|
| There is literally civilizations worth of knowledge generated
| by projects like this, not all of it exactly commercially
| useful but if you bump into it and they've solved your problem
| or written your tutorial better than you it's very nice to
| have.
| posnet wrote:
| It created White Rabbit[0], a system for sub nanosecond time
| keeping precision over ethernet. It is now used in many
| financial exchanges to ensure fairness for market participants.
| [1]
|
| (0): https://white-rabbit.web.cern.ch/
|
| (1): https://www.eurex.com/ex-
| en/support/initiatives/archive/high...
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