Very Large Hadron Collider

The Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) was a proposed future hadron collider planned to be located at Fermilab. The VLHC was planned to be located in a 233 kilometres (145 mi) ring, using the Tevatron as an injector. The VLHC would run in two stages, initially the Stage-1 VLHC would have a collision energy of 40 TeV, and a luminosity of at least 1⋅10³⁴ cm⁻²⋅s⁻¹ (matching or surpassing the LHC design luminosity, however the LHC has now surpassed this).

After running at Stage-1 for a period of time the VLHC was planned to run at Stage-2, with the quadrupole magnets used for bending the beam being replaced by magnets that can reach higher peak magnetic fields, allowing a collision energy of up to 175 TeV and other improvements, including raising the luminosity to at least 2⋅10³⁴ cm⁻²⋅s⁻¹.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Given that such a performance increase necessitates a correspondingly large increase in size, cost, and power requirements, a significant amount of international collaboration over a period of decades would be required to construct such a collider.^[1]

References

^ ^a ^b Glanz, James (10 July 2001). "Physicists Unite, Sort of, on Next Collider". The New York Times. p. F-1. eISSN 1553-8095. ISSN 0362-4331. OCLC 1645522. Archived from the original on 22 April 2021. Retrieved 31 August 2022.
^ Reich, Eugenie Samuel (12 November 2013). "Physicists plan to build a bigger LHC". Nature. 503 (7475): 177. Bibcode:2013Natur.503..177S. doi:10.1038/503177a. eISSN 1476-4687. ISSN 0028-0836. LCCN 12037118. OCLC 01586310. PMID 24226866. The giant machine would dwarf all of its predecessors. It would collide protons at energies around 100 teraelectronvolts (TeV), compared with the planned 14 TeV of the LHC at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. And it would require a tunnel 80–100 kilometres around, compared with the LHC's 27-km circumference. For the past decade or so, there has been little research money available worldwide to develop the concept. But this summer, at the Snowmass meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota – where hundreds of particle physicists assembled to dream up machines for their field's long-term future – the VLHC concept stood out as a favourite.
^ The VLHC Design Study Group (4 June 2001). Design Study for a Staged Very Large Hadron Collider (PDF) (Report). Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. FermiLab-TM-2149. Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 May 2022. This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the United States Department of Energy.