You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around doing little, probably working on other research, and then would need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back to collecting data.
RHIC is dead. Long live eRHIC.
What was the “experimental season”? Why was there an experimental season vs. running RHIC all year?
maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.
Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)
We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...
[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
Synchrotron light sources have had wide-ranging, concrete impacts on "industrial products" that you probably use every day via studies in: - Drug discovery (Tamiflu and Paxlovid are good examples) - Battery technology (X-ray studies of how/why batteries degrade over time has lead to better designs) - EUV photolithography techniques - Giant Magetoresistance (Important for high capacity spinning-disk hard drives)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_Radiation_Source
2. https://www.ukri.org/publications/new-light-on-science-socio...
[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...
[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...
Accelerators and colliders have had a profound impact on medical sciences. Nuclear isotopes used for nuclear medicine[1] is often produced by cyclotrons[2], the accelerator component of circular colliders. The detectors[3] used in things like PET scanners are based on detectors used in collision experiments[4]. Using protons to treat cancer was an idea that came directly from work on cyclotrons[5]. Using the tools developed to simulate how the collision fallout interact with the detectors at LHC[6] has been incorporated into radiotherapy to more accurately compute required doses[7][8].
> perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data
We are actually data starved, we have lots of good ideas but no way to test them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_medicine#Sources_of_ra...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_camera
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintigraphy#Process
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy#History
[6]: https://kt.cern/technologies/geant4
[7]: https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mp.17678
[8]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240542832...
The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.
Many things humanity builds are on the scale of colliders.
> The problem is that fundamental physics
I didn't know there was a problem. It seems like one of humanity's greatest successes.
(that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over our national discourse)
Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and Stony Brook was a great science minded university
I’m not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game and we are not a country of data centers alone
From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.
The owners of capital have created an amazing, self-serving ideology in the US (and elsehwere): If something doesn't help them make money, it's worthless. People seem to think that's part of the US - in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Even more amazing is that I hear scholars in non-profitable fields parrot those ideas. I think capitalism - and especially free markets - work well in many ways, but it's a means to an end, not a religion. Capitalism serves us, not vice-versa.
That's not why they were built
> then letting it have a look at the collider data.
I don't think you understand how collider data is analyzed
As an example, I talked about both large and small scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_Old_Ninth
https://www.culturalrevolutionceramics.com/object-details/do...
10% of the US military budget for one year could build a 100km collider, RHIC is 4km
Any useful consequence of a physical effect is, in effect, an experiment that could test that effect. So if the smallest test is with a machine the size of a small country, no device using the effect can be smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory
demonstrably works up to the electroweak scale, which requires an LHC-sized machine to probe.
The first useful internal combustion engines were room-sized, now they fit on a moped.
The truck-sized hole in your argument is talking about "the smallest test". First discoveries/demonstrations of interesting phenomenons don't typically happen at the smallest scale (why would they?).
In contrast, a particle accelerator like the LHC is designed from the outset to explore physics at a given energy scale at the lowest possible cost. Shrink it any further and it will no longer work. Despite decades of attempts to come up with alternative designs, when time comes to draw up plans for a successor capable of pushing to even higher energy, it's just more of the same:
https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli...
In terms of interaction energies, once you have an effective field theory which demonstrably works well up to some scale E, you know that whatever new physics you may find by colliding things at energies larger than E will not significantly affect physics at energies lower than E.
Thanks to the LHC and its predecessors, E is now upwards of 1 TeV, or equivalently a spatial resolution of 1 attometer; a billionth of a nanometer, less than a thousandth of a proton's diameter. Anyone arguing that this still is not enough, and that a larger accelerator may reveal new physics with wonderful technological properties, must be planning to go live inside a proton.