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from the superconducting-supercollider-2-turbo-championship-edition dept.
regift_of_the_gods writes:
"Particle physicists are pondering the successor for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the 27 km (circumference) tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border which has produced experimental data to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson. CERN recently announced it was studying several proposals for a next generation hadron collider; perhaps the most intriguing was TLEP, an enormous (80-100 km) circular collider to be built adjacent to the LHC, that would pass below Lake Geneva. A group of physicists mostly associated with Texas A&M University have counterproposed reviving the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), a partly-built 87 km circular collider south of Dallas that was abandoned in 1993 after Congress cancelled the project.
The Texas A&M physicists argue that a completed SSC would be powerful enough to generate the Higgs boson in quantities that would allow detailed study (a 'Higgs Factory' in the authors' words), while saving money relative to competing proposals since 45 percent of the tunnel has already been drilled. But then it gets real interesting; the authors propose an additional tunnel, an enormous 270 km circumference collider that would encircle the city of Dallas. Protons would be accelerated in the SSC tunnel for injection into the hadron collider."
(Score: 1) by NovelUserName on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:33PM
As a scientist I can tell you that the US does a pretty good job of getting $ to people doing research. The problem seems to creep in when the project becomes large enough that it becomes Political. Funding a multi-billion dollar project with no tangible product is a tough sell. Unless someone can point to the LHC and say "See? Big accelerator projects do x, y, and z for the country that owns them" The US won't fund the project. Even after that hurdle, the US would absolutely build a jobs program not a science program. The plus side is that NASA shows that you CAN do science with a jobs program- it's just not going to be optimally efficient.