Edwin Cartlidge reports in Nature magazine on November 9, 2017 that :-
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Originally Posted by Edwin Cartlidge, Nature magazine
Physicists Shrink Plans for Next Major Collider
Large Hadron Collider’s failure to detect new particles beyond the Higgs has eroded the case for Japan’s proposed linear accelerator
Limited funding and a dearth of newly discovered particles are forcing physicists to cut back plans for their next major accelerator project: a multibillion-dollar facility known as the International Linear Collider (ILC) in Japan.
On November 7, the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), which oversees work on the ILC, endorsed halving the machine’s planned energy from 500 to 250 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), and shortening its proposed 33.5-kilometre-long tunnel by as much as 13 kilometres. The scaled-down version would have to forego some of its planned research such as studies of the ‘top’ flavour of quark, which is produced only at higher energies.
Instead, the collider would focus on studying the particle that endows all others with mass—the Higgs boson, which was detected in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland.
Leading particle physicists nevertheless remain upbeat. A 250-GeV machine still has “a convincing physics case”, says Hugh Montgomery at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. He says that it could be upgraded to higher energies in future.
High-energy physicists have been planning a future linear collider for 25 years, but the ILC is now unlikely to see the light of day until at least 2030. They viewed the linear collider as complementary to the LHC, allowing physicists to scrutinize in detail any particles discovered at CERN.
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Article here :-
http://www.nature.com/news/physicist...llider-1.22983