Lucky 13

Wow, I hadn't realized that it had been a whole year since I posted anything to this site...

So, another U.S. Particle Accelerator School session comes to an end. This time, I was fortunate enough to teach at the winter session in Austin, Texas -- one of my favorite towns. Our course in the Fundamentals of Particle Accelerators had students from across the globe participating to learn about the basics of accelerator physics and (some) technology. I think we all had a lot of fun, both learning and teaching. (Both for me, at least!) UT is a great host, and the city has so much to offer in terms of food, music, and personality!

Here's a group photo of our class:

Coming back to the land of the SSC brought back many memories, and provided some interesting class discussions.

Still have the lead, with 13 courses overall taught at the USPAS. But, I'm told there are a couple of people trying to catch me. Guess I'll have to sign up again soon...

-Mike

Specification

specification - Oct 29 12:06PM

How are Superconducting Super Collider and the Large Hadron Collider similar, different and what specifically do they do?

Re: specification - Nov 01 12:21AM

Hi,

The SSC and LHC were/are both very large accelerators that are designed to give beams of protons lots of energy and then smash them head-on into each other. The energy from the collisions creates new particles that were likely only formed during the Big Bang of the creation of the universe. So, we use these machines to try to understand just what are the fundamental forces of nature, the fundamental particles of which everything is made, and how it all works together.

The LHC accelerates particles through a total of about 7 Trillion Volts of electrical potential (you'll probably talk about electricity and magnetism later this year in physics class). The SSC was going to be bigger than the LHC -- up to 20 Trillion Volts -- but the project was canceled in order to balance the U.S. budget, back in 1993.

Cheers,
-Mike

Re: Re: specification - Nov 05 11:16AM

Out of curiosity, how much would the LHC have put the US over the budget? Also, if you could go back and redo an event that got you to where you are today, would you?

Thanks
-Phil

Re: Re: Re: specification - Nov 07 4:31PM

Well, the US's SSC project, as it was called, was to cost about $8 Billion and was to take about 10 years to complete. The U.S. budget is debated every year in Congress, so project funding always has the possibility of going away in favor of other projects. That's what happened with the SSC. It was decided to spend the money on the International Space Station instead, where it was assumed that the U.S. couldn't afford to do both in 1994. By the time it was canceled, the SSC had already spent $2 Billion out of the 8.

I must say that it's different in Europe. There, the various countries have an agreement to build projects like the LHC, and they commit to do it for the next 5 years or so and then review progress. Thus, though there were often debates in Europe and it was never totally certain until the end, it was a bit easier to get a large project started and funded to completion over there.

As for regrets and redo's, I don't think I'd change anything. We've always got choices to make, typically while we don't have all the facts in front of us. We often see things differently years later with hindsight, but I don't think any decisions "on the spot" would be much different for me.

Cheers,
-Mike

SSC

hello, my name is denisse. im a senior ... and i have a question for you, how did you feel about the cancellation of the ssc project?


Hi Denisse,

It was a very hard thing to go through. It was going to be the largest machine built by mankind, and it was a very exciting project to work on. The government had spent over $2 Billion when it came to a close. (It was going to cost about $9B total.) My family and I moved from Chicago to Texas to work on it, and we lived there for almost 5 years. So, it was hard for us to suddenly be out of a job and looking for work again. It also meant to me that the U.S. wasn't as interested in science as it once was, which was sad, too. Luckily, I think this has all been changing the other way in recent years...

Thanks for your question!

-Mike


------


so what exactly was the SSC project? was it a way to conserve energy or what? and who came up with the idea of that project?

-Denisse


------
Hi Denisse,

The SSC was the "Superconducting Super Collider." It was going to be a very large particle accelerator, or "atom smasher." It was to be a circular machine, about 53 miles in circumference(!), in which protons would be accelerated to very high energies in opposite directions, and then collided head-on into each other. The energy of these collisions would be converted into new particles -- particles that had not been created like this since the time of the Big Bang -- and then we could study them. This accelerator would have been more than 20 times as powerful as the Tevatron accelerator that we run at Fermilab today.

We build these machines so that we can study the most fundamental questions, like: What is the universe made of? What forces are involved, and how do they work? Scientists first made particle accelerators back in the 1920's, and they have been getting more and more powerful ever since. The Tevatron at Fermilab was built in 1983, and the SSC was thought up by a group of U.S. scientists back in the early 1980's, soon after that. We finally began to build the SSC in 1988. However, it was canceled in 1993.

-Mike

Super Job

Dr. Syphers,

In your job what is the most interesting or unusual project that you have had a chance to work on?

Johnathon


----
Hi Johnathon,

I'd have to say that the most interesting project I ever worked on was the Superconducting Super Collider project. I worked on it a little bit, off and on, for a few years, and then full-time for about 5 years. It was a brand new accelerator laboratory that was being built just south of Dallas, Texas. Construction started in 1989, but was stopped in 1993. I was the 67th employee to be hired to work on it; when the project was canceled in 1993, there were over 2000 people at the laboratory. So, I was there at the very beginning and got to participate in a lot of very important design decisions for the project. Congress decided in October of 1993, however, that the national budget needed to be balanced, and that we couldn't afford to continue building it. (The total cost was going to be about $8 -- $10 Billion.) The main accelerator was to be 53 miles in circumference (we had already built 17 miles of tunnel for it -- about the size of the LHC in Europe!) and the energy of the protons would have been 20 times the energy of the Tevatron that I work on today at Fermilab. It would have been the largest scientific instrument ever built. Even though it was halted, it was certainly the most interesting and exciting project I have ever gotten to work on, and it was perhaps the most valuable experience of my career.

-Mike Syphers


----
Dr. Syphers,
Thank you for the reply, and in your opinion do you think that it would have been more beneficial to us to complete that project or was it a good decision by the government to stop the project?


I think it was an unfortunate decision to stop the project. It was good to balance the budget, which the government should always try to do; but, I think it was a huge sacrifice to pull the plug on that project. Today, people look at the huge accelerator being built in Europe, and ask me, "Why aren't we building one that big?" And I have to tell them about the SSC project and its failure. So, I just hope people learn that it's important to do basic research -- for knowledge's sake and for the economy -- and that projects like this take a long time to build, that the pay-off can be huge, and that our representatives in Congress need to be told by the citizens that they (the citizens) think this is important.

-Mike Syphers


----
Thank you so much for your reply!

i find it amazing that one can actually love what they do all of their life.
is there anything you've done in phisics that has been noted on a larger scale??
have you made any important breakthroughs or discoveries?

-henry

----
Hi Henry,

I am sorry to report that I haven't made any scientific "breakthroughs" or "discoveries" on a very large scale. That doesn't really happen too often in life, or to too many people. But, like most scientists, I've done my share of small increments in knowledge that have helped things along. For instance, the Top Quark is an important particle of nature that was discovered at Fermilab in 1995. To discover it, we had to collide protons and antiprotons together and this required very tiny beams of particles moving head-on toward each other. As we accelerate these particles, there are many things along their journey which try to make the beams larger, so we have to work very hard to keep them small. In the late 1980's I figured out one of the mechanisms that was making the beam too large, and re-designed a beam transport system to keep the beam smaller. This helped reduce the beam size by about a factor of two, and thus helped generate more collisions for the Tevatron. Did I discover the top quark? No, but I certainly helped make the discovery possible. We all do our part, and it's all important. In more recent years, I've worked further on these types of problems, and the rate at which the Tevatron collides particles is about 300 times what it was in 1990! Will we discover the Higgs particle before the LHC does? We'll see...

-Mike Syphers