You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The Large Hadron Collider - the story of the largest man-made experimental apparatus
What are your thoughts on the Superconducting Super Collider (the canceled accelerator that was being built in Texas in the 1990s)? It was supposed to be more powerful then the LHC, do you think that accelerator could have done things that the LHC can not?
The SCC project was cancelled in 1993. This is also the year where the LHC project was peer-reviewed. There is probably some kind of correlations between both events (although I don't know as I was clearly not in that field at that moment :p). Therefore, assuming the SCC being around, it is not clear the spotlight would have moved to Europe.
Just to put some numbers, the SCC was planned to have an energy of about slightly less than 3 times the LHC energy. With the higher energy, the energy frontier is pushed further. Now, is there anything to find there? Only nature knows so far. So maybe yes, some new stuff, maybe not. In any case, there is a clear zone where the LHC cannot go and where the FCC could have gone.
Another key component is the collected luminosity (the number of recorded collisions). This allows to make precision measurements and probe kinematical configurations that are rare. In other words, looking for new phenomena in an indirect fashion. The SCC was this time on the lower side, by a factor of 10. I have heard somewhere that in terms of Higgs boson production, the LHC wins by a factor of about 2.
Therefore, we can possibly say that the SCC and the LHC would have been complementary experiments (assuming high-energy physics could afford two large scale experiments at the same time).
Such a sad case of the US not wanting to spend the money to push forward the frontiers of science. Thanks for the information. :)