Ever since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, physicists have wanted to build new particle colliders to better understand the properties of that elusive particle and probe elementary particle physics at ever-higher energy scales.
The trick is, doing so takes energy—a lot of it. A typical collider takes hundreds of megawatts—the equivalent of tens of millions of modern lightbulbs—to operate. That’s to say nothing of the energy it takes to build the devices, and it all adds up to one thing: A lot of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Now, researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have thought through how to make one proposal, the Cool Copper Collider (C3), more energy efficient.
To understand how to do so, they considered three key aspects that apply to any accelerator design: how scientists would operate the collider, how the collider itself is built in the first place and even where the collider is built—which turns out to have a significant, if indirect, impact on the project’s overall carbon footprint.
“When discussing big science, it’s mandatory now to think not only in terms of financial costs, but also environmental impact,” said Caterina Vernieri, an assistant professor at SLAC and one of the co-authors of the new paper, which was published in PRX Energy.
2023-11-04 19:41:02
Post from phys.org