Thursday 27th October 2016 from 16:30 (Europe/Zurich)
A Bridge Too Far: The Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider
In October 1993 the US Congress terminated the Superconducting Super Collider — at over $10 billion the largest and costliest basic-science project ever attempted. It was a disastrous loss for the nation’s once-dominant high-energy physics community, which has been in a slow decline since then....
A Bridge Too Far: The Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider
In October 1993 the US Congress terminated the Superconducting Super Collider — at over $10 billion the largest and costliest basic-science project ever attempted. It was a disastrous loss for the nation’s once-dominant high-energy physics community, which has been in a slow decline since then. With the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Europe has assumed world leadership in this field.
A combination of fiscal austerity, continuing SSC cost overruns, intense Congressional scrutiny, lack of major foreign contributions, waning Presidential support, and the widespread public perception of mismanagement led to the project’s demise nearly five years after it had begun. Its termination occurred against the political backdrop of changing scientific needs as US science policy shifted to a post-Cold War footing during the early 1990s. And the growing cost of the SSC inevitably exerted undue pressure upon other worthy research, thus weakening its support in Congress and the broader scientific community.
As underscored by the Higgs boson discovery, at a mass substantially below that of the top quark, the SSC did not need to collide protons at 40 TeV in order to attain its premier physics goal. The selection of this design energy was governed more by politics than by physics, given that Europeans could build the LHC by eventually installing superconducting magnets in the LEP tunnel under construction in the mid-1980s. In hindsight, there were good alternative projects the US high-energy physics community could have pursued that did not involve building a gargantuan, multibillion-dollar machine at a green-field site in Texas.
Searches for sterile neutrinos and other BSM physics with the IceCube detector
by Dr. Salvado Jordi
22nd Nov 2016 - 11:00
Europe/Zurich
Searches for sterile neutrinos and other BSM physics with the IceCube detector
22nd Nov 2016 - 11:00
Europe/Zurich
CMS seminar
06th Dec 2016 - 11:00
Europe/Zurich
CMS seminar
06th Dec 2016 - 11:00
Europe/Zurich
UM Semester Abroad - Student Talks
by Goldfarb Steven
08th Dec 2016 - 16:00
Europe/Zurich
Student Talks for University of Michigan National Research Abroad Program at CERN
UM Semester Abroad - Student Talks
08th Dec 2016 - 16:00
Europe/Zurich
Neurospin Seminar
09th Dec 2016 - 14:00
Europe/Zurich
The future of high field magnet technologies for investigations of the human brain.
Speaker: Prof Denis Le Bihan
Neurospin Seminar
09th Dec 2016 - 14:00
Europe/Zurich
Euclid Mission Seminar
19th Dec 2016 - 10:00
Europe/Zurich
Euclid and the origin of the accelerating universe
Euclid is an ESA medium class astronomy and astrophysics space mission, selected by ESA in 2011 and planned for launch in 2020.
Euclid will explore how the Universe evolved over the past 10 billion years to address questions related to fundamental physics and cosmology on the nature and properties of dark energy, dark matter and gravity, as well as on the physics of the early universe and the initial conditions which seed the formation of cosmic structure.
Euclid will observe 15,000 deg2 of the darkest sky that is free of contamination by light from our Galaxy and our Solar System. Three “Euclid Deep Fields” covering around 40 deg2 in total will be also observed extending the scientific scope of the mission the high-redshift universe.
The complete survey represents hundreds of thousands images and several tens of Petabytes of data. About 10 billion sources will be observed by Euclid out of which more than 1 billion will be used for weak lensing and several tens of million galaxy redshifts will be also measured and used for galaxy clustering.
The analysis and interpretation of these data is led by the scientists of the Euclid Consortium, the single team having the scientific responsibility of the mission, data production and scientific instruments, including more than 1000 scientists from over 100 institutes.
In September 2016 a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between CERN and the Euclid Consortium granting Euclid the status of CERN Recognized Experiment.
During this seminar Dr Yannick Mellier, Euclid Consortium Lead, will present an overview of the mission covering the scientific targets (cosmology and fundamental physics), the technical challenges (instruments and ground segments) and the complex programmatic issues of this ambitious project.
