Does the world need the US to lead particle physics?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010068
Last Monday, the US Department of Energy announced that it would not pay the additional cost of three more years of Higgs hunting at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider. The extension, which was recommended by a panel of eminent physicists, would have given Fermilab a chance to scoop the Large Hadron Collider while the bigger machine spends 2012 off line and under repair.
Despite the glory that would redound to Fermilab if it found the Higgs, the merits of the proposed extension are not beyond doubt or challenge. As Adrian Cho put it in a news story that ran in Science last September.
Scientists at the last remaining U.S. particle physics lab have a shot at a major discovery. But pursuing that prize means delaying other projects that could enhance the lab’s long-term viability. Should they still go for the glory?
Those other projects form part of a broad strategy to direct Fermilab away from experiments at the energy frontier, where the Higgs presumably lives, and toward the intensity frontier, where rare phenomena are brought into view and studied. Prolonging Fermilab’s Higgs hunt would divert the lab’s resources—including particles accelerated by the Tevatron—from the NOνA neutrino experiment and others.
Not being a particle physicist, I can’t offer an expert opinion on the canceled extension. But as a naturalized American, I can complain about one of the justifications that some physicists in the US make to keep the Tevatron in the Higgs hunt: that the US must maintain leadership in particle physics.
As the energy frontier has advanced, so too has the cost of building accelerators and detectors. A next-generation machine capable of elucidating Higgs properties is beyond the budget of any single country. Particle physics has become international. As if to acknowledge the new reality, one possible next-generation machine, the International Linear Collider , even has “international” in its name.
If particle physics is inevitably international, why do US physicists fret publicly about losing leadership? Does particle physics even need a single country to lead it?
The answer to the second question is “no.” Answers to the first question could range from the not discreditable “out of national pride” to the cynical “to appeal to our Congressional paymasters.” Neither strikes me as compelling because neither evokes the reason for building the Tevatron in the first place: to further humanity’s understanding of matter’s ultimate constituents.
