The Future of High Energy Accelerators

Abstract

This paper begins with a review of those high energy accelerators which are now in operation. Accelerators under construction are discussed and very high energy machines, still far in the future, are listed and described. Possible uses of cryogenic and superconducting magnets are mentioned. Colliding beam projects in operation and planned are presented. High energy physics has become very expensive. The total investment in Brookhaven's 33-GeV accelerator complex is now over $60 million and is still rising. Merely to operate the accelerator and its experimental areas requires the services of over 400 people. Our power bill is about $1 million per year. All of this is to produce new knowledge, very fundamental in nature but without evident immediate application. With the budget of the United States in a state of unbalance and with growing sentiment that money spent should show immediate results, is it wise or even sensible to think of new and more expensive steps along the route to the solution of the many mysteries of the nucleus and its components? I think that it is wise and that frontier fields like that of high energy physics must be pursued vigorously if we are to maintain our intellectual and technical position in the world. Sooner or later our experimental results will have important impacts on our life, probably in quite unforeseeable fashions. Nuclear physics began its history before the turn of the century; only in the last two decades has it resulted in a new power industry.