Cari Cesarotti
speaker
212 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Cari Cesarotti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So you collide electron-positron or electron-anti-electron at reasonably high energies, so around a TeV or so, or maybe just near the Higgs mass to make a bunch of Higgs bosons. But you collide them in a line. So you don't get to circulate. You just collide them in a line. They either collide or they don't, and that's the end. Another option is to use circular colliders.
So this is what the LHC and the Tevatron were, is that you circulate these particles. So if they miss their collision, they still have another chance. And if you ever studied electromagnetism in school, you know that putting things in a circle is very different than putting things in a line. So that comes up with its own complications, and we can certainly get into that.
But in terms of circular colliders, we either think about doing a lepton collider, so either electrons or my favorite, muons, which are certainly an immature technology, or doing protons, so basically doing a bigger, badder version of what we can do at the LHC.
So... Since these are pretty big scale projects, and since we are kind of in this exploratory range of particle physics, I think that the attitude that a lot of these funding agencies and lab directors and experimentalists who actually want to see things happen versus just be like me and dream with a Mathematica notebook, I think given this climate,
And the fact that we can actually study a lot of Higgs physics with somewhat low energy things. I think the current attitude is to focus on lower energy circular electron colliders. And sort of the two places in the world that are presenting the most on-shell concepts of these projects would be China with the circular electron positron collider.
and CERN with the Future Circular Collider, or FCC, and then the FCCEE, so Electron-Electron Collider. But of course, one day it might not be future, so we'll have to rename it. But that's what it is for now.
I mean, I talk to a lot of physicists, Sean.
I mean, so for this next round of... experiments. The thing that the US has chosen to invest in right now is neutrino physics. So Fermilab, which is sort of our flagship particle physics laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, is committed to doing a big experiment called DUNE, and that's sort of measuring neutrino properties.
So the lab will have to go through a lot of updates in order to make this experiment the most efficient version that it can be. And that leads us for a lot of possibilities for doing things like research and development at Fermilab.
But I think that in combination with the fact that other big laboratories in the world are willing to and have put a lot of time and effort into sort of making a more concrete plan. Yeah, the U.S. is not going to be likely where we have the next E plus E minus circular collider.
Yeah, that's right. So I remember I actually grew up somewhat near Batavia where Fermilab is. So when I was in high school, you know, and I was just a fan of physics, I had this great T-shirt that was like the Tevatron, like 10 years running. Woohoo. And then like the next year they announced like, well, we're shutting it down for the LHC. And I was so I was so heartbroken.
Like, why would they turn it off like that? But I mean, yeah, these things are not cheap to run. And the fact that some other experiment could be doing basically its physics program more efficiently and then also more means that, yeah, it's probably not great to have too much repetition for these kinds of experiments. The Tavitron did a lot for particle physics.
But now that the LHC had turned on, it just makes sense to sort of let it carry the torch.
Yeah, so this is, to me, what I think will be the future of particle physics. So an E plus, E minus machine is very safe in the sense that we basically know how to build it. And we think that we have all the technology that we already would need to be able to make it work the way that we need it to work. A muon collider is a big risk, big payoff kind of machine.
And of course, as a theorist, I get to just say, ah, of course we should invest in this because my whole life is dreaming, Sean. Easy for you to say, yes. But yeah, a muon collider is a really exciting new option because, like you said, it sort of combines the aspects of being both a precision machine because they are fundamental clean objects. You're not colliding bags of stuff.
You're combining colliding two individual particles. And because a muon is heavier, we can accelerate it to much higher energies than electrons. So an electron circular collider really can't surpass more than a couple hundred GeV. Even going up to more than 300 GeV for electron-electron is a big ask.
And knowing if we have the magnet technology and even just the power to be able to do that is not clear at this moment. So with a muon collider is that you can break that frontier of higher energies than we've ever been able to go. You can do it in a circular machine, and you can do it in a somewhat clean environment, given the fact that muons are fundamental particles.
So when you hear this kind of stuff, I don't know how you can not be excited, right? It's such a beautiful promise of everything you could want put into one collider.
Yeah, well, that's kind of a bummer, eh? Microseconds.
Yeah, so the thing with these higher generation particles is that because they have all the same properties as the lower generation particles, if you want to be fancy, we'll call them quantum numbers, and they have higher mass, is that they have this really unpleasant tendency to want to decay, which is why atoms are made out of electrons and not muons, because muons, like you say, live for 10 to the minus 6 seconds, and then they decay away to neutrinos and electrons.
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