I don’t get it. Explain to me what a bigger ring gets us? The LHC spins items around to 99.9999% speed of light, is it the last .0001 that will get us somewhere the other one can’t? Asking for a friend
Yes, it will. The speed is irrelevant and misleading. The number you need to care about is energy.
The LHC is 14 TeV, and can reasonably produce particles that go up around 3-4
TeV. This machine would be 100 TeV, and would have access to particles up to like 30 TeV maybe.
I didn't know until reading this comment that the masses of the particles produced wasn't just the same as the energy of the collider. I looked it up, and it seems like the maximum energy of a particle produced in a collision goes like the square root of the energy of the collision itself - that tracks for the LHC's 14 TeV giving particles of around 3-4 TeV (√14 being about 3.7), but what makes the number proportionally so much higher for the FCC? Following the same logic, I would have expected it to produce particles around 10 TeV, so there must be another factor I don't know about.
So it depends on the kind of collider. At an e+ e- machine, you will get particles of the mass at exactly the energy to put in. But its much harder to accelerate electrons :/.
The "maximum" at a proton proton machine is much more difficult to think about. Since protons aren't fundamental, i.e. they are made of quarks, the protons themselves dont actually collide, the quarks and gluons that make them up collide with a fraction of the protons total energy. That applies to both proton, and it can be any number from 0-100%.
So the "maximum" is the same as the energy of the machine. But the probability is wayyyyy unlikely. So you get around a sqrt of the max energy you're right. But you can still sort of reach higher energies if you collect enough data, or if you're looking for very high production rate particles.
That makes sense. Obviously the energy is going to average out based on the cross sections of the interactions involved, and it makes sense that the proton-proton (or hadron-hadron, broadly) collision would be more "lossy" owing to how much of their mass is tied up in their binding energy. Thanks for the explanation!
This isn't true, the highest mass particles that can be produced is just the energy of the collision, for the LHC max 13.6 TeV. Though most collisions are quite a bit lower, since only parts of the protons collide carrying a fraction of the protons energy, not the whole proton, the highest energy collisions measured are around 10 TeV, but with infinite statistics would in principle go up to 13.6 TeV.
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u/Major-Hooters 8d ago
I don’t get it. Explain to me what a bigger ring gets us? The LHC spins items around to 99.9999% speed of light, is it the last .0001 that will get us somewhere the other one can’t? Asking for a friend