It's Time for a Linear Collider to Take Over

There are essentially no curved sections in the linear collider, except for low energy sections before injection to the main linac. The problem of the energy loss due to synchrotron radiation is thus absent. This allows us to go beyond the energy reach of the circular colliders in principle.

There are, however, hurdles to get over. We can only accelerate the same beam particles once and we can only make them collide once. We thus need

an accelerating field 10 times stronger than that of traditional circular colliders,
multi-bunch beam generation and its stable acceleration,
realization of an ultra-small beam spot of 3 nano-meters (10 times typical size of an atom) and controlling of such small beams to collide.

These require unprecedentedly high technology. There are a lot of world-wide R&D programs going on at various high energy physics laboratories including KEK. These R&D programs are producing a lot of remarkable results.

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webmaster@www-jlc.kek.jp Feb 08, 1995