7 ms·

More likely than not the next collider will be build in China, quite a few particle physicist luminaries have already made their case there. I for one am glad t

More likely than not the next collider will be build in China, quite a few particle physicist luminaries have already made their case there. I for one am glad that I stayed clear of the siren call to join the 3000+ grad student workforce at CERN. Sifting through the heap of data that was assigned to you is about as fun as it sounds I think. You get to look for the J/Psi, Pomeron, Dark Matter how exciting! In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs.

xondono 6y ago
I’m with you. Not only the job didn’t seem to match the prospect, the “large organization politics” drove me away pretty quickly.
willis936 6y ago
That’s just the nature of the machines. You spend so much effort to get to the nuggets, but you still get the nuggets. Does China have experience making particle colliders? I’ve seen their magnetic confinement fusion research devices. Even in the design stage, there are lessons yet to be learned that are well documented in other machines. That doesn’t mean the people working on them are dumb, or that all fields of large-magnetic-confinement-machine-building physicists are in the same position, but I think we should be pretty sure whoever builds the next big particle collider is actually up to the task.
- rubidium 6y ago
  These don’t get built by countries. They get built in countries. The home country matters and they’ll need to put up funding, but it’s an international workforce.
  - culturestate 6y ago
    > The home country matters...but it’s an international workforce. Given the current state of the world and the trajectory of the West's relationship with the Chinese government, it may have to be built by China if it's going to be built in China.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      China has a lot of STEM expertise, I'm confident they could probably figure it out.
      - willis936 6y ago
        Then it should be easy to demonstrate with smaller scale projects. Where are those demonstrations?
        MiroF 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp... If you mean smaller accelerators, it's unclear what the value in that would be.
        willis936 6y ago
        Actual design and building of physics experiments is a lot more complicated than “just doing it”. There are thousands of places that one small oversight will cause the entire project to fail. You will never successfully make a city size particle accelerator if you cannot demonstrate the ability to design and build a tabletop version, let alone a room scale, let alone a building scale, let alone a city block scale. It is cheap to demonstrate at a small scale. It is expensive to fail at a large scale. With respect, I have no idea what your link has to do with anything. Making a giant dish is absolutely trivial compared to a particle accelerator. My point is that Chinese medium-scale magnetic confinement fusion research devices have not learned from 60 years of painful lessons that the fusion research community have learned and published. Magnetic confinement fusion research machines share a lot of similarities to particle accelerators. Is there any indication that China would succeed in making a particle accelerator other than “they are good at STEM” and have made a giant parabola? It’s not very convincing.
      - culturestate 6y ago
        There's a difference between theoretical and practical expertise. I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise. This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using fully domestic processes.
  - vixen99 6y ago
    Is it supposed there are enterprises located in China exempt from oversight or control by the CCP? To what extent would decisions made within the enterprise be subject to President Xi's vision of complete control?
    - erikpukinskis 6y ago
      My understanding is, when it benefits them they will make a loophole to give some degree of autonomy. But they can revoke it as easily as they offer it. But I don’t really know anything about China.
mnky9800n 6y ago
And when you graduate you get a not in this field job because it's so competitive you probably were already ineligible by the time you started your PhD.
- orbifold 6y ago
  Well three of my friends are still hanging in there with a non-zero chance of success because they did their PhD in the right group. But yeah if you aren’t well connected or your advisor doesn’t like you this is a dead end.
Random_ernest 6y ago
I think people severely underestimate the scale, complexity, and time it takes to build large scale accelerators. There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. Building them takes years, sometimes decades. Additionally you need a lot of experience in building, operating and designing those. Having worked in accelerator physics for quite some time my opinion is that China does not have the skills to do this. Research labs that built such machines had decades of prior experience and the community support. China has neither of those. Imho the next big accelerator will be either some LHC upgrade, clic (very very unlikely) or the ILC.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  > There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. There will and it will come from photonics research.
  - jkelleyrtp 6y ago
    Or even crazier stuff like wakefield accelerators and petawatt lasers. At this point the LHC is like ITER - advancements to the foundational technology have jumped leaps and bounds yet we're still stuck with a huge multi-billion dollar machine running on fairly outdated tech.
    - Random_ernest 6y ago
      That is simply not true, the plasma wakefield accelerators are really a rather new technique but they are NOT meant to be used at such high energies, but rather for small experiments. Also (as far as I know), while they do have vastly superior energy gain per meter, you simply can't concatenate several of them (as you do with SRF cavities). So at the current state, if you want to reach TeV of colliosion energy, SRF is the only way to go. Current plasma wakefield accelerators are in GeV range, we need TeV.
  - Random_ernest 6y ago
    That is really vague. Even if there are interesting advancements in photonics, I seriously doubt that it will be able to accelerate particles to terra electron volts of colision energy in a controlled manner (in the next few years). Everybody I know that works in accelerator physics believes that for large machines, superconducting radio frequency cavities are the way to go.
adev_ 6y ago
> In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs. Do you really expect a detector/machine of the size of a building to have 100% availability ? This is the sciences world, boy, not aerospace engineering. These detectors are ''home-made' and much closer to an experimental prototype than to anything "engineered". We do not name them "CERN experiments" for nothing.

xondono 6y ago

I’m with you. Not only the job didn’t seem to match the prospect, the “large organization politics” drove me away pretty quickly.

willis936 6y ago

That’s just the nature of the machines. You spend so much effort to get to the nuggets, but you still get the nuggets. Does China have experience making particle colliders? I’ve seen their magnetic confinement fusion research devices. Even in the design stage, there are lessons yet to be learned that are well documented in other machines. That doesn’t mean the people working on them are dumb, or that all fields of large-magnetic-confinement-machine-building physicists are in the same position, but I think we should be pretty sure whoever builds the next big particle collider is actually up to the task.

rubidium 6y ago
These don’t get built by countries. They get built in countries. The home country matters and they’ll need to put up funding, but it’s an international workforce.
- culturestate 6y ago
  > The home country matters...but it’s an international workforce. Given the current state of the world and the trajectory of the West's relationship with the Chinese government, it may have to be built by China if it's going to be built in China.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    China has a lot of STEM expertise, I'm confident they could probably figure it out.
    - willis936 6y ago
      Then it should be easy to demonstrate with smaller scale projects. Where are those demonstrations?
      - MiroF 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp... If you mean smaller accelerators, it's unclear what the value in that would be.
        willis936 6y ago
        Actual design and building of physics experiments is a lot more complicated than “just doing it”. There are thousands of places that one small oversight will cause the entire project to fail. You will never successfully make a city size particle accelerator if you cannot demonstrate the ability to design and build a tabletop version, let alone a room scale, let alone a building scale, let alone a city block scale. It is cheap to demonstrate at a small scale. It is expensive to fail at a large scale. With respect, I have no idea what your link has to do with anything. Making a giant dish is absolutely trivial compared to a particle accelerator. My point is that Chinese medium-scale magnetic confinement fusion research devices have not learned from 60 years of painful lessons that the fusion research community have learned and published. Magnetic confinement fusion research machines share a lot of similarities to particle accelerators. Is there any indication that China would succeed in making a particle accelerator other than “they are good at STEM” and have made a giant parabola? It’s not very convincing.
    - culturestate 6y ago
      There's a difference between theoretical and practical expertise. I don't know much about particle accelerators, but I do know a bit about advanced manufacturing and I think you might be surprised at the degree to which Chinese industry is still functionally dependent on foreign machinery and expertise. This is a country that, until about two years ago, couldn't successfully produce an entire ballpoint pen using fully domestic processes.
- vixen99 6y ago
  Is it supposed there are enterprises located in China exempt from oversight or control by the CCP? To what extent would decisions made within the enterprise be subject to President Xi's vision of complete control?
  - erikpukinskis 6y ago
    My understanding is, when it benefits them they will make a loophole to give some degree of autonomy. But they can revoke it as easily as they offer it. But I don’t really know anything about China.

mnky9800n 6y ago

And when you graduate you get a not in this field job because it's so competitive you probably were already ineligible by the time you started your PhD.

orbifold 6y ago
Well three of my friends are still hanging in there with a non-zero chance of success because they did their PhD in the right group. But yeah if you aren’t well connected or your advisor doesn’t like you this is a dead end.

Random_ernest 6y ago

I think people severely underestimate the scale, complexity, and time it takes to build large scale accelerators. There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. Building them takes years, sometimes decades. Additionally you need a lot of experience in building, operating and designing those. Having worked in accelerator physics for quite some time my opinion is that China does not have the skills to do this. Research labs that built such machines had decades of prior experience and the community support. China has neither of those. Imho the next big accelerator will be either some LHC upgrade, clic (very very unlikely) or the ILC.

ganzuul 6y ago
> There wont be some magical new accelerator popping up. There will and it will come from photonics research.
- jkelleyrtp 6y ago
  Or even crazier stuff like wakefield accelerators and petawatt lasers. At this point the LHC is like ITER - advancements to the foundational technology have jumped leaps and bounds yet we're still stuck with a huge multi-billion dollar machine running on fairly outdated tech.
  - Random_ernest 6y ago
    That is simply not true, the plasma wakefield accelerators are really a rather new technique but they are NOT meant to be used at such high energies, but rather for small experiments. Also (as far as I know), while they do have vastly superior energy gain per meter, you simply can't concatenate several of them (as you do with SRF cavities). So at the current state, if you want to reach TeV of colliosion energy, SRF is the only way to go. Current plasma wakefield accelerators are in GeV range, we need TeV.
- Random_ernest 6y ago
  That is really vague. Even if there are interesting advancements in photonics, I seriously doubt that it will be able to accelerate particles to terra electron volts of colision energy in a controlled manner (in the next few years). Everybody I know that works in accelerator physics believes that for large machines, superconducting radio frequency cavities are the way to go.

adev_ 6y ago

> In reality most of the detectors are barely functional, Alice for example doesn’t produce useful data for most of the runs. Do you really expect a detector/machine of the size of a building to have 100% availability ? This is the sciences world, boy, not aerospace engineering. These detectors are ''home-made' and much closer to an experimental prototype than to anything "engineered". We do not name them "CERN experiments" for nothing.