The collider that never was

Most people may not know a great deal about particle physics, but they will have heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Just before it was turned on, sensationalist stories about ‘the end of the world’ flooded the newspapers.

The Daily Mail even went so far as to tell us that the earth would take a month to disintegrate, with molten lava flooding the fields, earthquakes tearing the crust to pieces, and mega-hurricanes leveling buildings and forests. This would then culminate in the earth being sucked into a ‘whirlpool of unimaginable force’, presumably a black hole. This was apparently the best-case scenario. Their ‘more terrifying’ scenario consisted of the earth vanishing from the fabric of space in one-twentieth of a second, followed by the moon, then the sun, and then the rest of the solar system. Personally, I think the prospect of a month-long Armageddon is more terrifying than vanishing almost instantly, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Obviously, we know that these situations are more the stuff of movies than reality, but if this is what journalists made of the LHC, then we can only imagine what the stories leading up to the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) would have said.

First proposed in 1983, the SSC is the collider that never was. It would have been the world’s largest particle collider, and was intended to have collision energies of up to 40 teraelectron volts (TeV). This, compared to the maximum 14TeV collision energy of today’s largest collider, the LHC, is a staggering amount of energy. In real world terms, 40 TeV doesn’t add up to much. A 100-watt lightbulb uses 36,000 Joules (J) of energy in one hour, which equates to over six million TeV. However, when working on such a small scale, these energies are much more significant, and hence allow scientists to probe inside subatomic particles.

As is stated in the title of the machines, they ‘collide’ particles together. That is, they fire beams of energised protons towards one another, and attempt to break them apart. With higher energy collisions, scientists can break subatomic particles into smaller constituents, which is why scientists are constantly looking to heighten the energies achieved inside colliders.

The SSC is now nicknamed the ‘Desertron’, due to the fact that is has been completely abandoned since 1993. The high cost of the project, coupled with poor management, led to the shelving of the SSC after $2 billion worth of construction. The idea of such a powerful collider was ahead of its time – scientists and politicians alike questioned the worth of such an expensive collider compared to the discoveries it could facilitate. Considering the leaps and bounds that have been made with the less powerful LHC, it would appear they had a point.

Last year, the discovery of a Higgs-Boson-like particle rocked the scientific community. It’s impossible to say how much further ahead particle physics would be had the SSC gone through to completion. However, the failure of the SSC led the minds behind the project to realise that international collaboration is the best way forward for projects on this scale.

We may have lost the prospect of an incredibly powerful particle collider, but CERN has allowed the best minds from all over the world, including some of Warwick’s own academics, to become involved with its many experiments. This unity between nations can only be good for the international community, both in science and politics.