By Tushna Commissariat
Are you suffering from particle-collider withdrawal symptoms now that the LHC has begun its long shutdown? If so, you will be pleased to learn that you can focus your attention elsewhere.
The International Linear Collider Collaboration has posted an updated version of its 2013 Technical Design Report on the arXiv preprint server. It’s a short and sweet overview of the collider’s design, including “detailed descriptions of the accelerator baseline design for a 500 GeV e+e llinear collider, the R&D program that has demonstrated its feasibility, the physics goals and expected sensitivities, and the description of the ILD and SiD detectors and their capabilities”.
If that’s whetted your appetite, you can take a look at the paper here. Also, if you would like more information on the International Linear Collider and the people behind it, take a look here – where Physics World’s Hamish Johnston talks to Lyn Evans, who heads up an international organization that promotes the development of a linear collider.
The fate of the ILC of around $7b will depend mostly on the performance and results of the LHC. It is claimed that the proton-antiproron collisions of LHC are more complex and “dirtier” (in terms of BG-production)than those of positron-antipositrons of the ILC, if one is after high precision data. It is true, but they are richer,too, in terms of producing quark-gluon plasma.