CERN Physicists To Build Longest-Ever Linear Particle Accelerator
Z+Higgs A simulation of what the decay of a Z + Higgs to four jets would look like in a proposed International Linear Accelerator detector. Norman Graf/ILCMove over, LHC -- the ILC will be 20 miles long Those physicists -- give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile. Or 20 miles. Groundbreaking science is just beginning to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider, but physicists are already planning their next atom-smasher -- a $6.7 billion linear collider they hope to start building in 2012. Physicists will meet in Paris this week for a conference on high-energy physics, and they're expected to discuss plans for an old-school linear particle accelerator. The 20-mile-long International Linear Collider (ILC) would be more than 10 times longer than the next-biggest linear accelerator, the SLAC linear accelerator at Stanford, built in 1962. The ILC would collide electrons with positrons. In terms of particle energies,...