Over the last half a century collider experiments have become the main method to investigate the laws of nature, study the structure and properties of the matter. During this period quarks, leptons and bosons were discovered, and the theory describing their interactions and transformations was created. In 2012 Higgs boson (a field particle) was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a result of interaction with which elementary particles acquire mass. However, a lot of questions have still remained unanswered. It is planned to build new colliders to make advances in understanding the nature of already discovered phenomena, and if we are lucky, they can help us to discover new phenomena at the frontiers of existing knowledge.
At present several new collider projects are being developed:
- Linear e+e- colliders ILC and CLIC for the energy of up to 2E=1 and 3 TeV, correspondingly. These colliders will be 40–50 km long. ILC project is almost ready for implementation in Japan.
- Cyclical e+e- colliders for the energy of 2E = 250-350 GeV which allow for a detailed study of the Higgs boson and top-quarks. The ring perimeter will be 80–100 km. In the future it is planned to build proton colliders in the energy range 100 TeV (7 times higher than at LHC). If nothing besides the Higgs boson is discovered on LHC, then in 2018 a decision to build large cyclical e+e- and pp colliders (FCC: Future Circular Colliders) can be made in CERN. China has plans to build such a collider too and can come ahead in this field.
- Muon colliders in the energy range from 100 GeV to 100 TeV. Muons have a low level of radiation because their mass exceeds that of electrons by 200. They can be accelerated and collided in the ring. It is not easy to build such a collider because muons are unstable particles, and it is first of all necessary to receive them and cool them down, which in itself is a complex problem. Muon colliders building which was first proposed by G. I. Budker in 1960–1970s are now mainly built in the USA at Fermilab.
The head of the Laboratory
professor Valeriy Ivanovich Telnov has taken part in all the enumerated projects from the moment of their inception and made a large contribution to the development of the concept of this collider. He also suggested the idea of photon collider, and is the leader in its development.
The goals of the Laboratory are to participate in all the aspects of research in this field, including the development of colliders, detectors and the physics program and take part in the experiments in the future.
The Laboratory is the member of
The Interdisciplinary Elementary Physics Particles and Astrophysics Center at NSU.
The Laboratory works in
collaboration with the following organisations: CERN (Switzerland), The High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) (Japan), high-energy particle-physics research center DESY (Germany), Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) (USA).
Head of the Laboratory: Professor Valeriy Telnov (Sc.D.) (Physics and Mathematics),
telnov@inp.nsk.su
Elementary Particle Physics Section
Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
