You've seen the Large Hadron Collider. Now comes the HUGE Hadron Collider

Re: Is that the best site?

True, but it's the only known location of the Godzilla Quark.

in the antiproton collector at CERN

with a stable beam in the PS, we could see the Mediterranean but mostly Atlantic tides slightly moving France on our beam diagnostics. And that was on the other side of the country, behind an Alp or two.

With linear colliders, they're rather less subtle than stochastically cooled circular ones - you generate a current, and launch/accelerate it in a straight line down an evacuated tube for a single 'bang', each run might well be different, whilst with synchrotron colliders like LHC you get to see nearly the same bunch of particles 27km/c =~ every 90 microseconds and can so prepare the beam 'density' a bit better?

I suppose I'll have to read the design report and see how it might be a good linear design? Last I heard it was hoped that the big interesting linear collider might go to DESY near Hamburg... are you still designing it Nick?

Oh & BTW , hadrons are multi-quark fuzzinesses - eg protons, pbars, neutrons, mesons, pions - not exactly e's and ebars - which are leptons, so might El'Reg be referring to the Huge Lepton Collider?

Re: Energy levels

> It does have the the advantage of being able to accelerate light particles,

Surely "light particles" always travel at c in a vacuum?

Re: HHC?

I think Timmy Mallet named it best:

Itty bitty hitty splitty, Speedy uppy piece of kit-ty

That they build in the land of Japan

Re: HHC?

Absolutely Correct! El Reg has to review its "nucular nomenclature".

Also, at The Well-Informed Blog of Peter Woit, we read, back in August 2012:

For many years now discussion in the HEP community of what might be the appropriate next machine to try and finance and build after the LHC has centered around the idea of a linear electron-positron collider. The logic has been that an electron-positron machine would provide a much better environment that the LHC for detailed studies of physics at the TeV scale. At these energies, synchrotron radiation losses when accelerating electrons are so high in a circular geometry that such a machine would have to be a linear collider to keep the power needed something plausible. The two main proposals under study have been the ILC (250 GeV + 250 GeV, later upgradeable to 500 GeV + 500 GeV) and, a less mature technology, CLIC (1.5 TeV + 1.5 TeV). These would be very expensive machines to build and operate ($10 billion and up?), requiring completely new technology, tunnels and detectors.

But also:

This realization is driving a new proposal that is getting a lot of attention: the idea of going back to circular electron-positron colliders, building a new machine in the LHC tunnel, optimized as a Higgs factory, and designed to operate at 120 GeV + 120 GeV. This is being called “LEP3″, since it would be in many ways similar to LEP2, the predecessor machine to the LHC, which operated in the same tunnel, reaching an energy of 209 GeV. There would be huge cost advantages to building such a machine over the ILC or CLIC, since it can use the LHC tunnel, infrastructure, and, crucially, the CMS and ATLAS detectors (the detectors are a large part of the cost of a new accelerator).

Re: meanwhile in the texas desert

That's a bit like upgrading from a Bentley to a Bugatti, when you know that what you really need is a supersonic jet. Not a big enough advance to be worth paying that much for. The LHC is the biggest ring we'll build in any forseeable future.

Linear accelerators are the most obvious way we might get a really big advance. In outline ... an electric field of a million volts per meter, over ten kilometers, is 10GV. Subject a proton to that and because it's ~2000 times more massy than an electron, that's ~20TeV. Now work on higher field strengths ... none of this is impossible, it's just unknown territory in engineering terms.

For a rather further-fetched idea, look up PASER (and consider where we are today, starting from some theoretical 1930s papers on the field effect ... with a big detour via germanium junction transistors).

How about "puncturing the cloud", then?

Why not? It's no different to the everyday usage of "nuke it"!

Doesn't everyone know about natural cosmic rays up to10^19 eV, and the number of them that have interacted with the sun in the last 4 billion years? (Hint: the sun is BIG). If really high energy particles had any untoward effects on large collections of matter, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. (Or the fun alternative, maybe they once DID have dramatic effects on the pre-universe, and that's WHY we're here talking about it! )

Re: Earthquakes

Well, there already are at least the Kamikande Neutrino Observatory. And then you have complete Boiling Water Reactors and actual towns sited in that country.

Re: They should call it...

No, there'd be too much uncertainty about size and position.

Re: If you want to bash Positrons & Electrons...

Doesn't work. The trouble is that charged particles emit electromagnetic radiation when you change the direction they are moving. The higher the energy of the particles and the tighter the bend, the more they do it. You reach a limit where it's not feasible to pump in energy any faster than the particles are shedding it, and the only way around that is a bigger ring (or ideally a straight line for zero losses, which is where this discussion started).