Physics of the 21st century.

Physics of the 21st century

Now that the Soviets are pushing construction and planning of large new particle accelerators, and the Americans hope to begin building the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), European physicists have gotten together at Erice in Sicily to consider their future options. Western Europe has two major accelerators under construction. At Hamburg, the German national laboratory, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), is building HERA, which will collide protons of 1 trillion electron-volts energy (1 TeV) with high-energy electrons. In Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is building LEP, which will collide electrons of 50 billion electron-volts energy (50 GeV) with 50-GeV positrons.

According to a report on the Erice meeting in the January/February CERN COURIER, CERN's Director General Herwig Schopper opined that the SSC, which will collide 20-TeV protons with each other, is "a large jump into unknown territory." He suggested Europe go by multiples of 10. If so, the next logical step would be the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which would collide 8-TeV protons with each other. It would be built in the same tunnel as LEP.

After LHC would come the Eloisatron, the pet project of the Italian physicist Antonio Zichichi, which would collide 100-TeV protons with each other. Romantically Zichichi named the project after the famous pair of lovers of the Middle Ages--the machine that injects protons into the Eloisatron would be called Abelard. Zichichi has suggested building the accelerator across Apulia, the "heel" of the Italian "boot." To get a head start on conception and planning for the project, an Eloisatron Institute will be held at Erice in June.