3 ms·
My perception is that this is closer to the direction the field has been moving for the last half decade or so. Pushing the "energy frontier" was needed to expe
by yummypaint 6y ago
My perception is that this is closer to the direction the field has been moving for the last half decade or so. Pushing the "energy frontier" was needed to experimentally find the higs and test supersymmetric theories. The higs was measured, and literally hundreds of proposed theories and particles, including very well-liked theories, have been eliminated. This is a big success.
However, it turns out that some of the same physics of extremely high energy scales is also accessible through extremely high precision/low background experiments like the many neutrinoless double beta decay searches, or the rapidly growing field of neutrino experiments.
In my oppinion, there is still compelling need for an accelerator specialized in colliding electrons with ions at lower energy than at the LHC. The nuclear physics community has been after this for some time now, and it looks like it will be built at Brookhaven. Now that FRIB is almost finished, this will probably be the big budget nuclear physics project for the next 5 years or so.
- djaque 6y agoOh, that's right. I wasn't really placing the electron ion collider (EIC) under the energy frontier umbrella, because they're moving in a different direction. I'm actually sort of involved with them too, but from a distance. I'm pretty sure it will happen, it's just a question of which of two proposals will succeed (more of a political question to be honest). My own interest isn't in colliders at all, but in building atomic probes like x-ray light sources and fast electron diffraction apparatus, but at a scale accessible to universities instead of large facilities.
- MiroF 6y agolike cheap RHEED?
- djaque 6y agoNot quite... the two main technologies I'm talking about are free electron lasers (FELs) and ultrafast electron diffraction. New technologies that only exist at national labs right now. If we could bring access to them to the university scale, then I think it would be a revolution similar to what the wide access to electron microscopy provided. There's so much unexplored physics in chemistry and biology happening at atomic time and length scales. Electron diffraction and FELs are right now the only good ways to study that, but right now they're locked away behind long waiting lists because they're too expensive to have a lot of them.
- embwbam 6y agoHuge segue, I'm a semi-retired web / data engineer just dipping my toes into research data software. I'm collaborating on a psychology paper, but I love physics. Can I ask you some questions? My email is in my profile.