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Published online 9 January 2008 | Nature 451, 112-113 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451112a
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Accelerator plans stalled after US and UK cuts
Budget woes spell trouble for International Linear Collider.
The machine on which the world's particle physicists have staked the future of their discipline hangs in the balance owing to budget cuts.
On 18 December, the US Congress passed a spending bill slashing funding for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a 31-kilometre machine to collide electrons with positrons, by three-quarters to just $15 million in 2008, money that has already been spent.
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Nature’s nightmare scenario of the LHC seeing nothing new may not be as unlikely as the publicity surrounding the machine, such as the claim that the Standard Model has withstood every challenge (A. Wright & R. Webb, Nature 448, 269, 2007), would suggest. The Standard Model raises several long-standing conceptual questions, and recently failed, by an order of magnitude, to account for the rate of hadron production at large transverse momentum in gamma-gamma interactions as measured at CERN’s LEP collider (http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.2744). The amplitude for the gamma-gamma interaction is asymptotically proportional to the sum of the squares of the charges of quarks. Its measurement therefore provides a basic test of the Standard Model. An unequivocal test at higher energy could have been made with the proposed ILC. Interestingly, however, a plasma wakefield e-e- collider might be able to do the same job at a fraction of the cost (C. Joshi, CERN Courier 47, 5, 28, 2007). Perhaps now is the time for the high-energy community to reconsider Rutherford’s famous words “We haven’t got the money, so we’ve got to thinkâ€.