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I think people severely underestimate the scale, complexity, and time it takes to build large scale accelerators. There wont be some magical new accelerator pop

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have jumped leaps and bounds yet we're still stuck with a huge multi-billion dollar machine running on fairly outdated tech.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.
  - ganzuul 6y ago
    Of course they do because their jobs depend on it. And nothing in this field has ever been done in a time-frame of a few years. It is a simple matter of voltage gradient. The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient.
    - Random_ernest 6y ago
      > The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient. Losses also scale with frequency. And while other acceleration principles have higher voltage gradient, they still can't reach TeV of collision energy, since you either can't concatenate them, or you can't control the beam sufficiently well. As I wrote in another comment, stuff like plasma wakefield accelerators need to get better by a factor of 1000 before they reach the realms of SRF accelerators. This wont magically happen over night. And most of these people have tenure, they hardly care for trends. I have been to all major accelerator physics conferences over nearly the last decade. Despite clic there is no one seriously claiming to go beyond LHC energy without SRF. No one. Not the plasma wakefield guys, not some strange theoretical accelerator principle. No matter what you read on Wikipedia. Your namedropping comments with very little actual content, disregarding the work of thousands of scientists show a certain arrogance that is super annoying.
      - ganzuul 6y ago
        I'll excuse you trying to make this personal and focus on the tangibles... Losses in a waveguide are miniscule because plasma is almost as good a conductor as a superconductor. Most of the energy is carried in the dielectric anyway. Technology is already being developed as ASIC PHYs for commercial applications as THz MIMO radios for the next generation of mobile networks. No doubt the next generation of accelerators will rely heavily on beam-forming, perhaps already in wakefield accelerators. If you are unfamiliar with ASICs, they are what enabled CD-ROM audio to use solomon-reed error correction while it was thought only a supercomputer could do that in realtime. Lasers already constitute an strange accelerator principle, able to seemingly circumvent a naive understanding of thermodynamics by rectifying energy in space. So don't scoff it. Extreme Light Infrastructure currently under construction will be able to perform nuclear transmutation. Far beyond that, and far beyond the capabilities of any theoretical radio-frequency accelerator, lies lasers powered by nuclear isomers.

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.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  Of course they do because their jobs depend on it. And nothing in this field has ever been done in a time-frame of a few years. It is a simple matter of voltage gradient. The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient.
  - Random_ernest 6y ago
    > The higher the frequency, the steeper the gradient. Losses also scale with frequency. And while other acceleration principles have higher voltage gradient, they still can't reach TeV of collision energy, since you either can't concatenate them, or you can't control the beam sufficiently well. As I wrote in another comment, stuff like plasma wakefield accelerators need to get better by a factor of 1000 before they reach the realms of SRF accelerators. This wont magically happen over night. And most of these people have tenure, they hardly care for trends. I have been to all major accelerator physics conferences over nearly the last decade. Despite clic there is no one seriously claiming to go beyond LHC energy without SRF. No one. Not the plasma wakefield guys, not some strange theoretical accelerator principle. No matter what you read on Wikipedia. Your namedropping comments with very little actual content, disregarding the work of thousands of scientists show a certain arrogance that is super annoying.
    - ganzuul 6y ago
      I'll excuse you trying to make this personal and focus on the tangibles... Losses in a waveguide are miniscule because plasma is almost as good a conductor as a superconductor. Most of the energy is carried in the dielectric anyway. Technology is already being developed as ASIC PHYs for commercial applications as THz MIMO radios for the next generation of mobile networks. No doubt the next generation of accelerators will rely heavily on beam-forming, perhaps already in wakefield accelerators. If you are unfamiliar with ASICs, they are what enabled CD-ROM audio to use solomon-reed error correction while it was thought only a supercomputer could do that in realtime. Lasers already constitute an strange accelerator principle, able to seemingly circumvent a naive understanding of thermodynamics by rectifying energy in space. So don't scoff it. Extreme Light Infrastructure currently under construction will be able to perform nuclear transmutation. Far beyond that, and far beyond the capabilities of any theoretical radio-frequency accelerator, lies lasers powered by nuclear isomers.