Physicists have unveiled designs for an ambitious $6.65 billion particle-smasher that would let scientists peer into the moments following the big bang -- and maybe restore flagging U.S. scientific prestige.
A report released in Beijing early on Thursday morning provides the first detailed design and cost estimates for the proposed International Linear Collider, which is viewed by physicists as a critical next step in their field.
But its high price and complicated design means that so far, everyone's rigorously avoiding discussion of where the project would actually be located. The U.S. government has contributed tens of millions of dollars to the ILC's research efforts, but has stopped short of saying it would seek to host the project.
"The Office of Science will continue to support its significant investments in ILC research and related accelerator technology R&D," said DOE Office of Science Associate Director Robin Staffin, in a statement released early Thursday.
Although it's an international project, the country hosting the site will be expected to bear most of the costs, making the decision a painful one for budget hawks.
The $6.65 billion estimate includes construction and components, but not labor for the 2,000-person project. The costs of R&D, or for the expensive particle detectors that would be operated separately from the collider itself, are not included. The figures are comparable to the roughly $8 billion being spent to construct CERN's Large Hadron Collider facility.
Thursday's report will let national governments evaluate the project on a bottom-line basis for the first time, adding a tangled political dimension to what has so far been an amiable lesson in cross-border scientific cooperation.
"We now have a very solidly checked out design on the table," said Albrecht Wagner, director of Germany's Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, or DESY, and chair of the international group of scientists overseeing the ILC project. "But as in any major science project, in the end the decision is with the politicians."
The ambitious ILC would complement CERN's Large Hadron Collider being finished this year in Geneva, Switzerland.
Scientists hope the European facility will lead to breakthrough discoveries explaining the origin of the universe and the basic properties of everyday matter. Scientists say the ILC would give them precision tools to help study those new findings.
The complementary roles of the LHC and ILC echo previous pairings in the field, in which the most powerful particle colliders have made initial discoveries, while differently designed facilities have allowed more subtle investigations. In this case, the ILC would smash together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, which can be more precisely measured than the protons used at the LHC.
Physicists hope these projects will help them find an elusive theoretical particle dubbed the "Higgs boson," which could explain why other particles -- and by extension ordinary objects such as pencils or people -- have the mass they do.
They also hope for experimental evidence of invisible "dark matter," believed to make up a majority of the universe's substance, and potentially even confirmation of dimensions beyond the four perceived by humans.
The ILC's future thus depends on what happens in Geneva late this year, when particles there begin colliding at near the speed of light, replicating on a tiny scale conditions just microseconds after the big bang.
"The projection of the science case for the ILC is incredibly strong, but we need some validation that our ideas and expectations have some basis in reality," said Barry Barish, the Caltech professor who serves as director of the ILC's Global Design Effort. "The better the LHC does, the better off we are. It means science is rich at that energy level."
In the United States, scientists and some policymakers see it as a badly needed way to restore the country's fast-declining national scientific profile.
The 1993 cancellation of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider left the United States, long a particle physics leader, without a next-generation facility. Already American scientists have been streaming to Geneva to work on the LHC, and that project's launch in December will shift the field's scientific center of gravity decisively to Europe.
With basic design work complete, the ILC project now moves into the engineering phase. But decisions made here will ultimately depend on the characteristics of the specific site chosen. Backers hope to have the location settled by 2010 or shortly afterward.
