After the LHC: The Next Really Big Experiments In Particle Physics
The CMS Experiment at the LHC via WikimediaSure, the Large Hadron Collider has another two decades of cutting-edge science left in it, but physicists are already designing the high energy experiments of the future. It took the Large Hadron Collider just three years to find the Higgs boson--but it took nearly 20 years to create the Large Hadron Collider. High energy physics happens at the speed of light, but the underlying practicalities move at the speed of bureaucracy, funding requests, and setting concrete. So to keep things moving forward, the global physics community is constantly envisioning and re-envisioning the next big things in high energy particle physics--things big enough to dwarf even the largest and most expensive science experiment mankind has ever created. Last month at a meeting in Krakow, Poland, we caught a glimpse of these next big things. CERN'S European Strategy Preparatory Group symposium earlier this month...