Raw energy: The latest on the high-energy particle accelerator

Teenagers crave the latest Sony Play Station. Adults pause at a Rolex watch display in the center of town. But Klaus Desch is holding out for raw energy. The physicist has his eyes set on building a new high-energy particle accelerator.

He's not alone. At a three-week meeting earlier this summer in Old Snowmass, Colo., particle physicists from around the world gathered to chart their field's future. What would they need, they asked, to help answer questions that lie on the frontier of physics and cosmology? The consensus: Physicists need a new linear collider, and they need to build it soon.

Such a machine, they say, would stretch for 20 miles underground - an arrow-straight "microscope" to probe the subatomic world. The device would send swarms of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, hurtling toward each other from opposite ends of the accelerator. The particles and antiparticles would meet in the middle, annihilating each other in a burst of energy.

From that energy, physicists say, new particles are expected to form - and quickly decay - that could open windows on the workings of the fledgling universe and perhaps explain such conundrums as the origins of particles' masses.

Results from such a machine also could point the way toward demonstrating that the four forces of nature physicists describe today are really low-energy manifestations of one force that existed when the universe burst into being in what has become known as the Big Bang.

Noting that a new machine would cost roughly $6 billion, "the world can afford only one linear collider," says Dr. Desch during an interview in his office at the German Electron-Synchrotron (DESY) accelerator lab here. "We should have it, we should have it fast, and we should choose the best technology to have it fast."

In the eyes of many here, that means adopting the design an international science and engineering team has been developing on the outskirts of this German port city. Dubbed TESLA, it is one of two major designs vying for selection as the next linear collider.

At first glance, building another high-price particle accelerator seems just as extravagant as buying a Rolex.

Europe's premier particle-physics lab, CERN, is building a multi-billion-dollar ring-shaped collider that, when finished, will be the most powerful in the world. Dubbed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine is scheduled to begin operation in 2006 near Geneva.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab has substantially overhauled its "Tevatron" collider, in Batavia, Ill., which now is hot on the trail of new particles. On New York's Long Island, the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is busy smacking the nuclei of gold atoms into each other in an attempt to recreate and study conditions thought to have existed in the early universe. And results from Stanford University's linear accelerator, forerunner of the new designs under consideration, are highlighting shortfalls in currently accepted theories about fundamental particles and the forces that act on them.

Yet the need for a new, more powerful linear collider stems from the science machines like the ones in Illinois and Switzerland are expected to yield, physicists say.

"The urgency is to have a new linear collider in operation concurrent with the LHC" and with similar energy levels, says David Burke, assistant director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator's (SLAC) technical division in Palo Alto, Calif.

SLAC is the focal point for designing and developing what it calls the Next Linear Collider. Along with a similar design being evaluated at Japan's high-energy physics lab, KEK, in Tskuba City, the NLC appears to be TESLA's main design rival.

To get "the full story" behind discoveries at the LHC in Geneva, Dr. Burke says, "we will need to have both machines running at the same time."

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