The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a proposed linear particle accelerator. It is planned to have a collision energy of 500 GeV initially, with the possibility for a later upgrade to 1000 GeV (1 TeV). Although early proposed locations for the ILC were Japan, Europe (CERN) and the USA (Fermilab), the Kitakami highland in the Iwate prefecture of northern Japan has been the focus of ILC design efforts since 2013. The Japanese government is willing to contribute half of the costs, according to the coordinator of study for detectors at the ILC. The ILC would collide electrons with positrons. It will be between 30 and 50 km (19 and 31 mi) long, more than 10 times as long as the 50 GeV Stanford Linear Accelerator, the longest existing linear particle accelerator. The proposal is based on previous similar proposals from Europe, the U.S., and Japan. In a staged approach, the ILC could initially be constructed at 250 GeV, for use as a Higgs factory. Such a design would be approximately 20 km in length. Studies for an alternative project, the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) are also underway, which would operate at higher energies (up to 3 TeV) in a machine of length similar to the ILC. These two projects, CLIC and the ILC, have been unified under the Linear Collider Collaboration.
Background: linacs and synchrotrons There are two basic shapes of accelerators. Linear accelerators ("linacs") accelerate elementary particles along a straight path. Circular accelerators ("synchrotrons"), such as the Tevatron, the LEP, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), use circular paths. Circular geometry has significant advantages at energies up to and including tens of GeV: With a circular design, particles can be effectively accelerated over longer distances. Also, only a fraction of the particles brought onto a collision course actually collide. In a linear accelerator, the remaining particles are lost; in a ring accelerator, they keep circulating and are available for future collisions. The disadvantage of circular accelerators is that charged particles moving along bent paths will necessarily emit electromagnetic radiation known as synchrotron radiation. Energy loss through synchrotron radiation is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the mass of the particles in question. That is why it makes sense to build circular accelerators for heavy particles—hadron colliders such as the LHC for protons or, alternatively, for lead nuclei. An electron–positron collider of the same size would never be able to achieve the same collision energies. In fact, energies at the LEP which used to occupy the tunnel now given over to the LHC, were limited to 209 GeV by energy loss via synchrotron radiation. Even though the nominal collision energy at the LHC will be higher than the ILC collision energy (14,000 GeV for the LHC vs. ~500 GeV for the ILC), measurements could be made more accurately at the ILC. Collisions between electrons and positrons are much simpler to analyze than collisions in which the energy is distributed among the constituent quarks, antiquarks and gluons of baryonic particles. As such, one of the roles of the ILC would be making precision measurements of the properties of particles discovered at the LHC.
ILC physics and detectors It is widely expected that effects of physics beyond that described in the current Standard Model will be detected by experiments at the proposed ILC. In addition, particles and interactions described by the Standard Model are expected to be discovered and measured. At the ILC physicists hope to be able to:
Measure the mass, spin, and interaction strengths of the Higgs boson If existing, measure the number, size, and shape of any TeV-scale extra dimensions Investigate the lightest supersymmetric particles, possible candidates for dark matter To achieve these goals, new generation particle detectors are necessary.
Merging of regional proposals into a worldwide project In August 2004, the International Technology Recommendation Panel (ITRP) recommended a superconducting radio frequency technology for the accelerator. After this decision the three existing linear collider projects – the Next Linear Collider (NLC), the Global Linear Collider (GLC) and Teraelectronvolt Energy Superconducting Linear Accelerator (TESLA) – joined their efforts into one single project (the ILC). In March 2005, the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), a working group of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, announced Prof. Barry Barish, director of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech from 1997 to 2005, as the Director of the Global Design Effort (GDE). In August 2007, the Reference Design Report for the ILC was released. Physicists working on the GDE completed a detailed ILC design report, publishing it in June 2013.
Design The electron source for the ILC will use 2-nanosecond laser light pulses to eject electrons from a photocathode, a technique allowing for up to 80% of the electrons to be polarized; the electrons then will be accelerated to 5 GeV in a 370-meter linac stage. Synchrotron radiation from high energy electrons will produce electron-positron pairs on a titanium-alloy target, with as much as 60% polarization; the positrons from these collisions will be collected and accelerated to 5 GeV in a separate linac. To compact the 5 GeV electron and positron bunches to a sufficiently small size to be usefully collided, they will circulate for 0.1–0.2 seconds in a pair of damping rings, 3.24 km in circumference, in which they will be reduced in size to 6 mm in length and a vertical and horizontal emittance of 2 pm and 0.6 nm, respectively. From the damping rings the particle bunches will be sent to the superconducting radio frequency main linacs, each 11 km long, where they will be accelerated to 250 GeV. At this energy each beam will have an average power of about 5.3 megawatts. Five bunch trains will be produced and accelerated per second. To maintain a sufficient luminosity to produce results in a reasonable time frame after acceleration the bunches will be focused to a few nanometers in height and a few hundred nanometers in width. The focused bunches then will be collided inside one of two large particle detectors.
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