Circulating ideas about a new Higgs factory
Sketch of LEP3/TLEP double ring: a first ring accelerates electrons and positrons up to operating energy 45-120 (180) GeV and injects them at a few minutes interval into the low-emittance collider ring, which includes high luminosity interaction points (A. Blondel/U. Geneva)
Could the LHC tunnel one day house a high-luminosity electron-positron collider? This idea joined others at the LEP3 Day, held at CERN on 18 June 2012.
In 2011, early LHC indications suggested that the Higgs boson might be light, with a mass in the range 115-130 GeV. On Christmas’ Eve 2011 the first concrete proposal for a high-luminosity circular electron-positron collider was presented after Alain Blondel of Geneva University realised that an object like this could be studied in the LHC tunnel at about 240-GeV centre-of-mass energy.
This, along with the numerous encouraging reactions to this proposal, led the EuCARD Work Package 4 “AccNet” to organise a “LEP3 Day”, which was only a few weeks before the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of a Higgs-like boson with a mass of 125 GeV. About 40 motivated accelerator physicists from Switzerland, Japan, Russia, US and the UK participated in this EuCARD LEP3 Day, including Steve Myers, CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology, the KEK trustee Yasuhiro Okada, and members of CMS and ATLAS. A full report on the LEP3 Day is now available.
