Physicists plan costly look at the beginnings of the universe

[Al-khiyal]

The price of exploring inner space went up Thursday.

An international consortium of physicists meeting in Beijing released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the next big thing in physics: a machine 31 kilometers, or 19 miles, long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.

The machine, the International Linear Collider, would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build, the group reported.

"The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it, not surprisingly, does remain expensive," Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and the chairman of the design team, which includes 60 scientists from around the world, said in an e-mail interview before the announcement.

Physicists acknowledge that it could be years before the world commits to building the machine, also known as the ILC, although jockeying for the costly privilege of being host to the machine has already begun. The project committee priced three possible sites: near the European Center for Nuclear Research, which is also known as Cern and is near Geneva; the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois; and in the mountains of Japan.

In its initial phase, the collider would be 31 kilometers long and hurl electrons and positrons, their antimatter opposites, together with energies of 500 billion electron volts. Later, the collider could be extended to 50 kilometers and a trillion electron volts.

The proposed machine, physicists say, is needed to complement to the Large Hadron Collider, which is now under construction at the European Center for Nuclear Research. That machine will be the world's most powerful when it goes into operation this fall, eventually colliding beams of protons with seven trillion electron volts of energy apiece. Physicists hope that the Large Hadron Collider will detect a long-sought and elusive particle, the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow all the other constituents of nature with mass. They hope, too, to discover new laws and forms of matter.

But protons are bags of smaller particles called quarks and gluons, and their collisions tend to be messy and wasteful. Because electrons and positrons have no innards, their collisions are cleaner, they can be used to create and study with precision whatever new particles are found at the European Center for Nuclear Research.

The hitch is that until the Large Hadron Collider proves its worth by actually finding something new, the governments of the world are unlikely to agree to contribute their share of the billions.

Particle accelerators derive their punch from Einstein's equation of mass and energy. The more energy they can pack into their little fireballs, the further back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang and perhaps ultimate truth about nature, recreating particles and laws that once ruled the cosmos but have since vanished more completely than the dinosaurs. But as physicists have pushed inward and backward, their machines have gotten bigger and more expensive.

The Large Hadron Collider cost about 4.7 billion Swiss Francs, or about $3.8 billion, according to the European Center for Nuclear Research. But that price does not include the cost of digging the collider's tunnel, which has a circumference of about 29 kilometers and had been used for a previous machine, nor most of the above-ground complex, which has been a world center of particle physics for decades.

A competitive proton collider that would have been even bigger, the Superconducting Super Collider, was canceled by the U.S. Congress in 1993. At the time, its estimated cost had ballooned to $10.3 billion in 1993 dollars, said Robin Staffin, associate director for high energy physics at the Department of Energy.

The collaboration on the International Linear Collider involves 1,000 scientists and engineers from 100 countries and is being led by a steering group headed by Shin-ichi Kurokawa, who is part of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, which has based in Japan.

The committee found that the cost of so-called site-specific costs, like digging tunnels and shafts and supplying water and electricity, were nearly the same, about $1.8 billion, at the three sites in Switzerland, the United States and Japan.

The host country would be expected to shoulder these costs, while the remaining $4.9 billion, which covers includes high-technology things like magnets and control rooms, would be divided among all the participants.

Physicists plan costly look at the beginnings of the universe

[Bent_Bladi]

whoa... sounds extremely geeky. (lol @ positrons )

[Al-khiyal]

A £2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations.

The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory that built the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.

It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

Last week an apparently furious and embarrassed Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, wrote to his staff saying they had caused “a pratfall on the world stage”. He said: “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”

The machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aims to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe is thought to have exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago. However, the November start-up may now have to be delayed until next spring.

Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.

“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by Cern researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments.

The accelerator is designed to smash together protons, a kind of sub-atomic particle, at near light speed. The hope is that such collisions will generate exotic new particles — especially the so-called Higgs boson which, theorists predict, could help explain key properties of matter, such as how it acquires mass and, hence, weight.

The LHC itself comprises two pipes, each containing a beam of protons travelling at near-light speed that are steered around the circular tunnel by powerful magnets. Such magnets are “superconducting” meaning they and the whole LHC are cooled to below -268C, using pipes filled with liquid helium.

The two proton beams travel in opposite directions but, at various points around the ring, their pipes merge, allowing the protons in each beam to collide.

However, since the thickness of each beam is less than that of a human hair, they have to be focused. This is the task of a second set of magnets, and it is these that were under test at the time of the explosion.

Coincidentally, Fermilab stands to gain most from delays at Cern. Its researchers also operate a rival but less powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron.

Fermilab staff are pushing the Tevatron to ever-higher energies hoping that they might find the Higgs boson before the LHC switches on. An LHC researcher said: “Ironically, this delay could be all they need.”

Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong

[Al-khiyal]