The “International Linear Collider”:http://www.linearcollider.org is the priority machine for the high-energy physics community after the Large Hadron Collider begins operations in just over a year. This week, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver hosts a huge ILC workshop, a forum for discussing technical, research, and educational issues surrounding the machine.
The ILC will be about 30 km long, site yet to be chosen. No single nation can support it – only a tightly knit international collaboration, like BaBar, ATLAS, or CMS can come together, earn the support of their home nations, and bring their minds and resources to bear in building it. If built, it would be the successor to the “cadillac” of electron-positron colliders, LEP, and a flagship of frontier science in the world. The LHC will break open the terascale like the hammer of Vulcan, revealing (we hope!) a whole new world of physical principles which manifest at low energy as classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and relativity. It is the ILC that will assemble the pieces inside the Terascale into a coherent picture of nature, complementing the LHC and non-accelerator studies of neutrinos, dark matter, and dark energy.
But first we have to build it, and that means earning the support of our nations. Jodi is at the workshop, representing non-accelerator physics leading the search for the nature of dark matter. She’ll “report on the status of direct detection methods of searching for dark matter”:http://physics.cooleysekula.net, which makes up 80% of the mass of this universe. She took some notes today during Joe Lykken’s presentation on why we should build the ILC. I reprint them here out of interest:
Why build the ILC -- J. LYKKEN
* Tera-Scale
o Higgs
o SUSY
o extra dimensions
o new force
* Dark Matter
o No single approach - need direct/indirect and colliders to maximize knowledge.
o ILC & LHC can produce and study
* Unification
o force unification
o unification with neutrinos, leptogenesis
* Tough Questions
o What if there is no higs
o what if there is SUSY but it is heavy
measure heavy sleptons
o what if higgs but no susy
little higgs with T parity -- still see effects because it mixes with top
o what if all new physics is at 10 TeV
ILC has sensitivity to effects 10 TeV and above
