cvitae.org - From Lightning Bolts to Synchrotrons: The Evolution of the Particle Accelerator

The LHC is a remarkably versatile accelerator. It will be able to collide proton and antiproton beams with energies around 7-on-7 trillion eV, providing beam crossing points of unsurpassed brightness and experiments with high interaction rates. It can also collide beams of heavy ions (charged atoms) such as lead with a total collision energy in excess of 1,250 trillion eV, about thirty times higher than at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider just built at the Brookhaven Laboratory in the United States. [17]

The LHC with its detectors will be the most expensive accelerator facility built to date. The roughly U.S. $6 billion costs will be shared mostly between the twenty member states, in proportion to each country’s Gross Domestic Product [7] (Fig. 7).

For the ﬁrst time, non-member states will bring a substantial commitment to the project as well. For example, in the U.S., the Department of Energy will invest $450 million and the National Science Foundation $81 million in the LHC and two of its giant particle experiments[5], the CMS (Compact Muon Spectrometer) and ATLAS (“A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS”) [3]. Three U.S. national labs—Brookhaven, Berkeley, and Fermi—and the U.S. industry will provide the superconducting cables, sophisticated magnets, and high purity alloys and ﬁlms for the LHC[10].

The LHC project is the ﬁrst time the US will contribute signiﬁcantly to the construction of an accelerator outside its borders [12]. This is likely to stay that way: the FY 2001 U.S. budget makes no references to other serious eﬀorts for providing high-energy accelerator facilities that could rivals LHC’s [3].

Figure 7: Contributions of CERN member states in 2002. In Millions of Swiss Francs (U.S. $ 1 _≈

The LHC project is also the ﬁrst time for other non-member nations to contribute signiﬁcant amounts. Japan has promised 8.85 billion Yen (roughly U.S. $ 70 million); India U.S. $12.5 million, Russia 67 million Swiss Francs (roughly U.S. $ 40 million), and Canada $30 million Canadian (roughly U.S. $ 20 million).

Possibly more important to the LHC project than monetary aid are the intellectual contributions scientists and engineers from other countries are making. Over the 1990s, the number of scientists from non-member nations all over the world using CERN’s facilities has increased dramatically. Perhaps, the LHC marks a transitional phase into world-wide collaboration. Some 30% of collaborating scientists are from non-member states[22]. Half of the world’s experimental particle physicists are involved in research at CERN, and no other nation is planning an accelerator that can rival that of the LHC. Perhaps, the once unrealistic dream of a “world accelerator for world peace” is ﬁnally becoming reality.

References

[1] Brookhaven National Laboratory Publication, Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/focusing.html: June 5, 2001.

[2] http://www.nidlink.com/ jfromm/history/nuclear2.htm

[3] Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2001.
w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2001/maindown.html: June 1, 2001.

[4] CERN Press, The History of the LHC Project http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/general/history.htm:
Jun. 4, 2001.

[5] CERN Press, U.S. to contribute $531 million to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Project.
http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/Releases97/PR07.97ELHC-US.html, June 4, 2001.

[6] CERN Press, CERN Budget, http://ﬁ-div.web.cern.ch/ﬁ-div/scale.htm: Jun. 5, 2001.

[7] CERN Press, CERN Members, http://cern.web.cern.ch/CERN/Divisions/EP/MS/Welcome.html: Jun. 5, 2001.

[8] CERN Press, Magnets for the Large Hadron Collider,
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/general/magnets.htm: downloaded Jun. 5, 2002.

[9] CERN Press, The Large Hadron Collider: Physics for the 21’st Century,
http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/Releases94/PR07.94ELHCthePhysics.html: downloaded
Jun. 4, 2002.

[10] Department of Energy Secretarial Speeches, Remarks by Secretary of Energy Federico Pena, Dec. 8, 1997.

[11] Desler, K./ Edwards, D.A. (DESY), Accelerator Physics of Colliders. Eur.Phys.J.C3:138140,1998: 3.

[12] Paul Preuss, U.S., Berkely Lab to Take Part in International Collaboration on Large Hadron Collider, Berkeley Lab Science Articles Archive: Dec. 19, 1997.

[13] Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientiﬁc Community in Modern America, rev. edition (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 62.

[14] Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999) 296

311.

[15] Sven Kullander, Accelerators and Nobel Laureates August 28, 2001 (from http://www.nobel.se/physics/articles/kullander/, May 27, 2002).

[16] Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, The God Particle (Boston, Houghton Miﬄin Company, 1993).

[17] The LHC Study Group, Design Study of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN Report 91-03 (1991).

[18] Michaela Mann, Paciﬁc Northwest National Laboratory, Big Bang, Big Science, from http://www.pnl.gov/er news/02 98/art2.htm, June 10, 2001.

[19] Pestre, D., & Krige, J. Some Thoughts on the Early History of CERN. pp. 78-99 in Galison, Peter and Bruce Hevly, eds.,Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.)

[20] Ernest Rutherford, “The Scattering of the Alpha and Beta Rays and the Structure of the Atom” Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Soc IV, 55 18-20 191.

[21] Nature, vol 120, p 809, 3 December 1927

[22] D. H. Saxon, Particle Physics in International Collaboration. Speech given at Kolloquimstag, “125 Jahre Teilchenphysik in Aachen,” Oct. 1995.