Was the Large Hadron Collider a Waste of Time (and Money)?
The Large Hadron Collider is a massive, 27-kilometer wide machine, which uses electromagnets to slowly ramp a proton beam up to high energies and speeds, then collides it together with another beam. The scale of the device is immense and a large reason why it had a $9 billion pricetag ... before the recent repair bill, for fixing the problems that arose shortly after start-up.
One problem with devices like this is that each of them is essentially its own prototype. Particle accelerators are not devices which can be mass produced ... or are they?
A New Scientist article published on Monday suggested that new plasma-based accelerators could perform some of these accelerations at a cost and size greatly reduced from the LHC. Basically, the system involves shooting a laser beam into an excited plasma, which pushes the electrons in the plasma away from each other. This creates a dense bundle of electrons in the wake of the pulse, which pushes other electrons rapidly up to high speeds.
One of the problems with this suggestion (originally posed in 1979) was how to make a uniform energy beam, but this was resolved (by three different groups) in 2004. Now the issue is one of trying to come up with a good design, and working the kinks out of it to achieve what's needed. (There's also a serious problem in how to accelerate positrons using this method, which may have no real solution in the foreseeable future.)
According to New Scientist, the U.S. Department of Energy is supposed to evaluate these new methods, and possibly fund such a design, in March of this year. One proposal is a modest 10 GeV beam device, while another is an ambitious 250 GeV design!
I'll keep my eyes open for word on what the Department of Energy decides.
Related Articles:
- Large Hadron Collider
- New Scientist - Desktop atom smashers could replace LHC
- TG Daily - Alternate collision method suggests LHC may have been total waste of $9 billion
- Nature - Monoenergetic beams of relativistic electrons from intense laser–plasma interactions, High-quality electron beams from a laser wakefield accelerator using plasma-channel guiding, and A laser–plasma accelerator producing monoenergetic electron beams (three September 2004 letters to Nature, showing similar breakthroughs)
- Physics Review Letters - Laser Electron Accelerator (abstract from 1979)
Comments
I hate scientists and their worship of science as if it’s a god in itself. Blind following to sceince. Niiiiice.
Indeed, there are mass production particle accelerators for electron linear accelerators used in Radiotherapy for cancer treatment, and more recently proton and carbon linear accelerators for the same purpose. Of course, the energy is below GeV, but it is not needed more than that.
In the same way, there are proposals to replace them by laser-plasma based accelerators.
Strange headline for an article that deals with two almost completely different topics. Would you ask the same question if the LHD had been build in the USA? At the time when the project was founded the above “oldfashioned” way was the Best known. It is and was indeed an extremely expensive endeavour. But tell me, when are you going to be able to build another particle accelerator that can do what the european can. Please, you are scientist. Don’t use such headlines before having thought about it at least two times! You see what you get(see comment of Mark).
If the smaller machines just produce particles and not micro black holes they would be preferable. Space and time is connected and it is worrying that a black hole drags space faster than light can escape. How would we escape and could it drag time so that all of our past is drawn in. Interesting point because how does one comprehend utter destruction working back through all lives and every point of living becomes an experience of crushing and burning. The question could just as easily have been is life a waste of time if our future is simply to haul all of our existence including our past into the pit. I am not going to pick on Mark for having reservations.
This would be great for electron collisions but electrons are not hadrons (i.e protons and neutrons). They are in the lepton group, which is different from the quark group and it’s the quarks that make up hadrons. Since quarks and electrons are both in the Fermion family, maybe we could learn some of the same things from electron collisions but I suspect that smashing some protons will yield some unique results.