The Moon is not the best place for a giant particle accelerator
The current plans for the Future Circular Collider are for it to be about 90 km in circumference, over 3 times longer than the current world champion, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). That will give us collision energies of 100 TeV versus the LHC’s 14 TeV.
That is all well and good, but it could be a lot of work and $20 billion for nothing given that we have no compelling theoretical reasons to expect there to be anything new at those energies. Certainly it would nail down a lot of details in the Standard Model of particle physics, but it might fall short of what is needed.
The other problem with it is that we can’t expect the FCC to even be operating until 30 years after its approval. While this sounds like a great project for engineers, it doesn’t sound like much fun for experimental particle physicists. An entire generation will be forced to spend the majority of their careers with the current state of the art accelerators which will all be operating beyond their lifespans.
The bigger problem with the FCC and especially even larger colliders, however, is the availability of sites where it could be built without running afoul of political sensitivities, land use problems, and local objections. The LHC currently runs through two European nations. All large building projects in the western world these days require lengthy environmental reviews which eat up time and alter plans.
In order to avoid these issues, the collider must be built in a remote area, but doing this on land still limits the size because of the difficulties of boring through different kinds of rock and under mountain ranges.
Recently, a group has proposed building a collider in the Gulf of Mexico and floating it in the sea in neutral buoyancy, the aptly named Collider in the Sea (CitS) with a potential 1900 km circumference and energies of 500 TeV.
A truly massive collider, on the order of 10000 km, needed to probe into the Peta-electron Volt range, might be prohibitive anywhere on Earth. The Planck energy scale meanwhile is 10 quadrillion TeV, meaning that we are not even getting near to where civilization needs to be in order to truly understand the nature of matter.
The problems of building such a large collider anywhere on Earth are clear: on land it would be subject to geology, populations, ecology, and seismic activity. The latter could easily damage such a large structure which needs to be carefully tuned in order to accelerate protons close to the speed of light. Placing the collider in the middle of the Pacific, on the other hand, would present other problems.
One recent proposal by Beacham and Zimmermann is to build the collider on the moon, where it could simply be tunneled along a great circle, giving us an 11000 km collider wrapping its way completely around the moon’s surface. While I don’t think this is a good plan for a number of reason that I’ll give at the end, it is fascinating to think about what humanity might achieve in the next century on the moon. The recent landing of a private spacecraft on the moon suggests that moon travel is heating up, and we will see a lot more plans for how to use our nearest extraterrestrial world.
The following is a summary of the Beacham-Zimmerman plan:
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