Cornell is taking the lead in drafting research and development plans for the accelerator itself and for the detector that would that would reconstruct the trajectories of the charged particles discovered in the next major step into inner space. The university's Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics, or LEPP (previously the Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies), is organizing a national consortium to submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in September for about $1 million in funding to support the research. LEPP's director Maury Tigner today called the effort "a grass roots collaboration."
The future of the linear collider, and the options for its design, also will be discussed by Gerald Dugan, professor of physics at Cornell, at the joint meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) and the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society, Monday, April 22, at the Albuquerque, N.M., Convention Center. Later in the day, Dugan will present a talk, "Linear Colliders: Achieving High Luminosity," in which he will review the challenges facing the four leading designs for the huge machine.
The linear collider would seek to detect the Higgs boson, the holy grail of particle physics, and would also explore supersymmetry and antimatter, providing fundamental details abut the origin of the universe, the structure of space and the nature of matter itself. The machine, actually two high-energy accelerators pointing at each other, would accelerate beams of electrons and positrons at very high energies and hurl them at a microscopic target to see whether newly discovered particles emerge. However, although Department of Energy-funded research on the accelerator has been under way at two U.S. national laboratories for the past decade, there is no agreement on its final design, its funding sources and its location -- even which country it will be in. The most likely locations are in the United States, Germany or Japan. Estimates of the cost range from an estimated $5 billion to $7 billion, depending on which of the four designs is chosen.
All involved agree that work on the collider must begin within Þve years, and that it will require major funding from Washington. As Tigner noted at today's meeting, "For the linear collider to have a good chance of success in the U.S. framework, it is going to be absolutely necessary for the NSF to have a significant role. Having the NSF say 'this is important' and that it wants a major role, is going to be of significant help."
Cornell's interest in the linear collider spans all four designs because the LEPP is determined to play a major role in the machine's development. "The high-energy physics community in the U.S. has sanctioned the linear collider as most likely to be the next energy frontier, so this is the logical place for us to get involved," says Dugan.
LEPP does have a particular interest in one of the designs, called TESLA, a superconducting accelerator conceived at Cornell but developed over the past decade at DESY, Germany's renowned particle physics laboratory near Hamburg. "Everyone has agreed that no matter which design is chosen they will go along with that decision," says Dugan. But, he says, "TESLA's superconducting technology has a lot of advantages." One reason, perhaps, is that thanks to the German research, the cost of the machine has been brought down to about $5 billion.
Competing designs, all "warm" machines and closer to $7 billion in cost, are being advanced by Stanford Linear Accelerator, Japan's KEK and Europe's CERN. "I think it's too early to say which design is the most promising at the moment," says Dugan. "Which design eventually is chosen will be determined by political as well as technical considerations."
LEPP operates the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) and its CLEO III particle detector.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.
o LEPP: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/
o Linear Collider Consortium: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/public/LCCOM/
o Next Linear Collider: http://www-project.slac.stanford.edu/nlc/home.html