PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smasher

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PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smasher

Post by bystander » Mon Jul 26, 2010 6:35 pm

Plans for an international linear electron smasher - the ILC
PhysOrg | General Physics | 26 July 2010
Physicists at the European particle physics laboratory CERN are planning a straight collider 31 kilometers long to complement the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and help them explain the mysteries of the universe.

CERN's 27-kilometer ring atom smasher, the LHC, only became fully operational in March this year, but the scientists plan to start building a new International Linear Collider (ILC), at a cost of $6.7 billion, in 2012 to smash electrons and positrons together. The only other linear electron collider is the 3.2-kilometer-long Stanford Linear Accelerator built in 1962 in California.

The tunnel will use superconducting magnets to accelerate electrons and their antimatter equivalents, positrons, towards each other at near light speed. Construction is expected to take seven years. European director of the ILC project, Professor Brian Foster, said the linear collider would enable physicists to explore in more detail the findings of the LHC.

The ILC is expected to work with the LHC, which smashes protons together. Foster describes proton crashes as “dirty,” and said it’s like smashing two oranges together at 45 mph and hoping the pips hit each other head-on. In the proton, the “pips” are the quarks making up the proton, and often only one quark from each colliding proton will have a direct hit. Foster said the LHC is good at finding things, but it only gives physicists information on the maximum amount of energy a collision might involve, but tells them little about how the energy is distributed between quarks.

The ILC will give them more precise information on the high-energy frontier because it smashes electrons together, which are 2,000 times smaller than protons, and are not thought to contain sub-particles. When two electrons collide the released energy is known exactly. Electrons cannot be effectively collided in the LHC because the tunnel is a ring, and when electrons are bent by magnetic fields they emit X-rays, as do other particles. Electrons are so small that most of the energy pumped into an electron would only replace that lost as X-rays.

© 2010 PhysOrg.com
More information: ILC - http://www.linearcollider.org/
An Alternative CLIC - The Compact Linear Collider Study

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Re: PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smas

Post by Beyond » Mon Jul 26, 2010 8:54 pm

Electrons are not thought to contain sub-particles? where did they ever get that idea from?? As far as i know( :?: )all things are powered by the energy that is in the strings that make up all things and electrons are no different then protons or neutrons except for the charge or lack there-of that comes from the particular order of assemblage of individual strings into groups and the order the groups are combined into bigger and bigger aspects of the building blocks of the universe.
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Re: PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smas

Post by Henning Makholm » Mon Jul 26, 2010 10:13 pm

beyond wrote:Electrons are not thought to contain sub-particles? where did they ever get that idea from??
That's the standard model.
As far as i know( :?: )all things are powered by the energy that is in the strings that make up all things and electrons are no different then protons or neutrons except for the charge or lack there-of that comes from the particular order of assemblage of individual strings into groups
1. String theory is not (yet?) mainstream.
2. Electrons are clearly different from protons and neutrons in that the latter are well established to consist of specific subparticles (quarks, interacting through gluons). Such a decomposition is necessary to explain the observed behavior of nucleons, whereas electrons experimentally behave simply enough for them to be indivisible.
3. Even so, things are not "made of" energy. Energy is not a component of a particle, but simply a calculatable property of a system in a particular state.
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Re: PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smas

Post by bystander » Mon Jul 26, 2010 10:25 pm

Electrons are different then protons and neutrons. While all are fermions, electrons are one of the elementary particles called leptons. Protons and neutrons are baryons, which are composite particles (hadrons) made up from three elementary particles called quarks.

See the Standard Model of particle physics.

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Re: PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smas

Post by neufer » Mon Jul 26, 2010 10:35 pm

  • INTERNATIONAL
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    ANTI-LINEA-TRON
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: PhysOrg: Plans for an international linear electron smas

Post by Beyond » Tue Jul 27, 2010 2:38 am

bystander wrote:Electrons are different then protons and neutrons. While all are fermions, electrons are one of the elementary particles called leptons. Protons and neutrons are baryons, which are composite particles (hadrons) made up from three elementary particles called quarks.

See the Standard Model of particle physics.
Toooo much theory built upon theory for me. I think I'll stay out of the science of things until the scientists come up with more substantial things. Perhaps they may even discover some forms that energy has taken that they do not yet know about.
But one thing would seem to be very true - it's hard to figure out what things are and how they actually worked after they have been smashed to bits. It would seem to me that that would have a very detrimential effect on all the parts of what was smashed together and would cause quite a few changes in how things appear to be.
So I'll just wait a while and see what the LHC comes up with.
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