Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions and bosons. There are three generations of fermions, but ordinary matter is made only from the first fermion generation. The first generation consists of up and down quarks which form protons and neutrons, and electrons and electron neutrinos. The three fundamental interactions known to be mediated by bosons are electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states. Israel is the only non-European country granted full membership. CERN is an official United Nations Observer.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed path increases with time during the accelerating process, being synchronized to the increasing kinetic energy of the particles. The synchrotron is one of the first accelerator concepts to enable the construction of large-scale facilities, since bending, beam focusing and acceleration can be separated into different components. The most powerful modern particle accelerators use versions of the synchrotron design. The largest synchrotron-type accelerator, also the largest particle accelerator in the world, is the 27-kilometre-circumference (17 mi) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, built in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It can accelerate beams of protons to an energy of 6.5 tera electronvolts (TeV or 1012 eV).
The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a concept for a future linear particle accelerator that aims to explore the next energy frontier. CLIC would collide electrons with positrons and is currently the only mature option for a multi-TeV linear collider. The accelerator would be between 11 and 50 km long, more than ten times longer than the existing Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) in California, USA. CLIC is proposed to be built at CERN, across the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva, with first beams starting by the time the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has finished operations around 2035.
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. 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 High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, known as KEK, is a Japanese organization whose purpose is to operate the largest particle physics laboratory in Japan, situated in Tsukuba, Ibaraki prefecture. It was established in 1997. The term "KEK" is also used to refer to the laboratory itself, which employs approximately 695 employees. KEK's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics, material science, structural biology, radiation science, computing science, nuclear transmutation and so on. Numerous experiments have been constructed at KEK by the internal and international collaborations that have made use of them. Makoto Kobayashi, emeritus professor at KEK, is known globally for his work on CP-violation, and was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Neutrino Factory is a proposed particle accelerator complex intended to measure in detail the properties of neutrinos, which are extremely weakly interacting fundamental particles that can travel in straight lines through normal matter for thousands of kilometres. Up until the 1990s, neutrinos were assumed to be massless, but experimental results from searches for solar neutrinos and others are inconsistent with this assumption, and thus indicate that the neutrino does have a very small mass.
The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider is an upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located at the French-Swiss border near Geneva. From 2011 to 2020, the project was led by Lucio Rossi. In 2020 the lead role was taken up by Oliver Brüning.
Bjørn Håvard Wiik was a Norwegian elementary particle physicist, noted for his role on the experiment that produced the first experimental evidence for gluons and for his influential role on later accelerator projects. Wiik was director of DESY, in Hamburg, Germany, from 1993 until his death.
The Global Design Effort (GDE) was an international team tasked with designing the International Linear Collider (ILC), a particle accelerator to succeed machines such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), with the endorsement of the International Committee for Future Accelerators. Between 2005–2013, the GDE led planning, research and development, and produced an ILC Technical Design Report.
Lyn Evans CBE, is a Welsh scientist who served as the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Based at CERN, in 2012 he became the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration, an international organisation managing development of next generation particle colliders, including the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider.
Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
Paul Heinrich Söding is a German physicist. He is best known for his work in particle physics and as former director of research of the German particle physics lab DESY.
Peter Jenni, is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN. He is best known as one of the "founding fathers" of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider together with a few other colleagues. He acted as spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until 2009. ATLAS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1992 involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 183 institutions in 38 countries. Jenni was directly involved in the experimental work leading to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s and the Higgs boson in 2012. He is (co-)author of about 1000 publications in scientific journals.
The Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) is an accelerator study for a possible upgrade of the existing LHC storage ring - the currently highest energy proton accelerator operating at CERN in Geneva. By adding to the proton accelerator ring a new electron accelerator, the LHeC would enable the investigation of electron-proton and electron-ion collisions at unprecedented high energies and rate, much higher than had been possible at the electron-proton collider HERA at DESY at Hamburg, which terminated its operation in 2007. The LHeC has therefore a unique program of research, as on the substructure of the proton and nuclei or the physics of the newly discovered Higgs boson. It is an electron–ion collider, similar to the plans in the US and elsewhere, although the present design would not include polarized protons.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed particle accelerator with an energy significantly above that of previous circular colliders, such as the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Tevatron, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The FCC project is considering three scenarios for collision types: FCC-hh, for hadron-hadron collisions, including proton-proton and heavy ion collisions. FCC-ee, for electron-positron collisions, and FCC-eh, for electron-hadron collisions.
Dilip Devidas Bhawalkar is an Indian optical physicist and the founder director of the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (CAT), an institute under the Department of Atomic Energy, serving as a centre for higher studies in the fields of lasers and particle accelerators. He is credited with pioneering research in optics and lasers in India and is reported to have contributed in making CAT a partner in the International Linear Collider and Large Hadron Collider experiments of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He is a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, the highest Indian award in science and technology. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian award of the Padma Shri in 2000.
Nan Phinney is a retired American accelerator physicist at SLAC. She was program coordinator for the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC), the world's first linear collider. Her research interests are high energy colliders and linear colliders. She became an American Physical Society Fellow in 1993. Her last job title at SLAC was "Distinguished Staff Scientist".
A Higgs Factory is a particle accelerator designed to produce Higgs Bosons at a very high rate, allowing precision studies of this particle. A Higgs factory was identified as the highest future priority of particle physics in the 2020 European Strategy Report. This view was reaffirmed in 2022 by the International Committee on Future Accelerators.
