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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

beyond wrote: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

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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.