4 ms·
Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to
by bpye 4y ago
Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?
- Isinlor 4y agoUltra-high-energy cosmic rays are possible candidate. For example, Oh-My-God particle had energy of a baseball traveling at 100 km/h. 40 million times higher than particle energies of terrestrial accelerators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle
- Certhas 4y agoThe limiting factor is the strength of magnetic fields you can achieve. The more momentum the particles have, the stronger a field you need to bend them into a circular orbit. The attainbale strength is determined by material properties and there is nothing to suggest that we can get orders of magnitude improvement here. The improvements have been quite linear for decades, see the figure here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01869-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01869-1 And you eventually run into rather fundamental problems of tearing your atoms apart with the magnetic field you create. But I am not up to speed on how close we actually are to these limits.