In 2012, scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, proved the existence of the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle that gives other particles their mass. The discovery confirmed the mathematical theory at the core of the Standard Model of physics, which attempts to explain why the physical universe works the way it does. And it’s only possible thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, a ring of highly efficient magnets buried hundreds of meters below the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The collider accelerates subatomic particles to extremely high speeds and smashes them together to find out what they’re made of.
Peter McIntyre, a physicist and particle accelerator expert at Texas A&M University, and his colleagues think that there may be many particles with natural energy in the universe, such as the Higgs boson, which can only be found in collisions—a collision larger than Large. Hadron Collider can create. Gizmodo interviewed him about his ambitious proposal for a machine that could produce that discovery: A particle accelerator 2,000 kilometers in circumference floating in the Gulf of Mexico, which McIntyre and his colleagues call the Collider in the Sea.
This interview is edited for length and clarity.
Todd Feathers, Gizmodo: The Large Hadron Collider is 27 kilometers in circumference. The conflict zone you propose to build in the Gulf of Mexico is about 2,000 kilometers in circumference. Why is bigger better?
Peter McIntyre: The equivalent of what a hadron collider can do is a giant ring of magnets that work with the power to create a magnetic field that is the path of a rotating proton beam. The magnetic field in the Large Hadron Collider magnet has a field strength of about 8 Tesla; that is about 80,000 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.
The problem you face when trying to make high power collisions is that you have to make high magnetic fields, which is technically very challenging. It means you have to go for rarer superconductors than our good old friend niobium-titanium. Or, you have to go out of the tunnel and take a very big circular tunnel.
A consortium of scientists in Europe and the US and Japan and China have been working separately and together on projects to try to develop a way to create high-power superconducting dipoles, the magnets that would need to do that, in principle. being 16 Tesla which is about twice [Large Hadron Collider] power in the field. As of today, only one magnet has been successfully used up to that field and no magnets have been made that have the correct geometry. [for a collider].
So that inspired me. That’s why I dreamed of dope, so to speak, crashing into the sea. I propose to travel 2,000 kilometers and make a ring that can inscribe the Gulf of Mexico. I set that scale regardless of what Mother Earth is sitting on. That 2,000 kilometer radius would enable you to create a collisional field of 500 tera-electron-volts. [Editor’s note: For comparison, the Large Hadron Collider produces collisions at 14 TeV.]
It will open the range of discovery. If mother nature has new natural habitats available, that would be big enough to be a good bet for a gambling man. [that we could find them].
Gizmodo: What is a particle accelerator and how does it work?
McIntyre: In the case of a hadron collider, you start with a bottle of hydrogen gas. The gas is ionized by placing it in a cell containing electrodes and a radio frequency field.
That’s enough to strip electrons from the nuclei of hydrogen atoms and that gives you an empty proton. A proton is the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. It is the basic building block of all nuclei and is the nucleus of all hydrogen atoms in our universe and on our planet. So it’s a jim-dandy thing to start with if you want to explore the internal structure of nuclear materials.
Then take the stripped protons and accelerate them in an electric field. Usually what you do is use a pattern of electric fields, meaning rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields, to accelerate them to increasing kinetic energy and go through a sequence of such accelerators.
When you finally get to about as high power as you can go with that kind of process you use a device called a linear accelerator, or LINAC, and you put them in the first line of the circular accelerators where the beam is moved. with a powerful magnet that makes it rotate in a circular motion.
As they move around, in one place or several places in the ring, you insert radio frequency pulses that each time they land give them a kick in the pants. You accelerate the lifting force to support your circular ring, then transfer it to a completely different ring, a much larger ring, and then do the same thing again.
And that’s it [Large Hadron Collider] is doing today to produce the highest energy conflict ever made by man.
Gizmodo: Building an underwater magnetic ring the size of the Gulf of Mexico seems very challenging. How would it be done?
McIntyre: You could put them in remotely operated vehicles, ROVs, which are standard equipment in the marine technology world today.
You could use a ring a hundred meters down under the sea, neither down nor up. Above it would be completely unthinkable because of all the sea trade of human society. And near the ground would be a dubious proposition for a multitude of viewpoints due to the topology of the ground—it’s not a blueprint.
So you’ll be doing this neutral motion, like a floating submarine and keeping it in position using a device, a common device, called marine thrusters. Basically it’s just like an onboard engine, mounted in the trunk in several places around the ship. And the motor can be rotated 360 degrees. You can rotate it in any direction you want to deliver the thrust.
An array of those things in this ring of super-magnets can control the area, so it won’t be swept away by ocean currents. It is below the level of damaging when there are typhoons, a typhoon may pass over it and collide without even knowing it is happening because it is 100 meters away.
I presented this at international conferences for accelerator builders and no one came up with a deal-breaker at those meetings. The questions I am often asked are ‘Well, Dr. McIntyre, you know, this is not how we build hadron colliders.’ Well, my only answer to that is, yes, I understand that. Indeed, I have been involved in building a few. And what I will tell you is that, in my opinion, it is impossible that you will build in the future unless you learn to think in a bigger area than the way you have been building things.
Gizmodo: How much can a collision at sea cost?
McIntyre: It is very difficult to throw the cost in this category of such a thing, but somewhere in the area of 20 to 30 billion dollars. Which is almost like the community that has spent in every field of high energy physics in its history all over the world.
The measuring stick that one can say has not crossed what in physics we call the unity bound. In other words, you didn’t really go nuts. If you’ve crossed that out into one possible future project that would be the sum total of all expenditures ever made in that field at all times by all people, then, yes, probably, you should just forget about it.
But it doesn’t go beyond that. Most of the other things that people talk about with something like that, in my opinion, they cross that line. But again, no one is talking with any certainty about the cost numbers for any of these things because there is still a lot to be done to get anywhere with them. I have no hope that I will be able to get funding from our Department of Energy or anyone to make that development to collide at sea, because in their guts they still don’t really believe in it.
Gizmodo: How sure are you that something else can only be found with a large collider?
McIntyre: I must say that I am not sure that there are any other particles like the point even at a distance where they can be reached in a terrestrial accelerator or collider to find them directly. I’d say I’m very optimistic, but I’m not confident.
Gizmodo: If there is no guarantee that we will find a new particle, why is it worth spending tens of billions of dollars to build a collider on this scale?
McIntyre: That’s a piece of epistemology. You can’t say why it’s important until you know what it is.
When [Ernest] Rutherford carried out his experiment—as psychological as it was in his day—to discover the nature of the atom, a completely heretical idea at the time. And when he was asked by people in the media ‘What do you think is important about that?’ He said, I’m not sure if it’s very important or important, but it’s very funny.
Those were his words, weren’t they? But almost nothing in our modern technology is possible without that understanding of the atom and how the atom is organized and built. Nothing.