It's both an exciting and angst-producing time to be a high-energy particle physicist. Exciting, because Europe's nearly finished Large Hadron Collider promises to unlock realms of physics previously open only to speculation.
But that's a mixed blessing for those whose lives and careers are bound up with today's premier U.S. high-energy physics facility, Fermilab, which will lose its leading role in the field as the LHC starts up.
Last week, Fermilab directorsquietly outlined plans for a new accelerator in the Batavia, Ill. facility, temporarily dubbed "Project X," that would help keep the lab active and in the forefront of research while it bids to host a larger international project designed to complement the European experiments.
Pegged by the Chicago Tribune at $500 million, Project X would provide a technological stepping stone to the proposed International Linear Collider, argued a Fermilab Steering Group report completed earlier this month. Many of the practical research and engineering questions for that future collider could be answered by the proposed interim project, the report said.
Nor would the science itself be negligible.
The proposed ILC would use superconducting magnets to accelerate electrons and positrons (their antimatter counterparts) near the speed of light before smashing them into one another. Like the LHC, the X
project would instead use colliding protons, although at a much lower energy level than will the European facility. The lab says the resulting collisions would nevertheless offer a valuable new tool for studying unanswered questions, in particular the nature of neutrinos, still-mysterious particles that could offer key clues about the origin and early moments of the universe.
Project X still must be approved by a scientific advisory panel, and win funding from the U.S. government. Neither of those are shoe-ins, particularly given the huge price tag -- $6.8 billion at initial estimates – for the proposed ILC, the largest share of which would likely be borne by the host country.
But for a laboratory facility used to being in the lead, and seeing its working life come to an end within the next few years, a new project like X in the works, blemishes and all, will be something to fight for.
(Photo: Fermilab)
