Superconducting Super Collider Research Articles

End station refrigerator 2 cryoplant at Jefferson Lab

The End Station Refrigerator 2 (ESR2) cryoplant will provide cryogens to three of the four experimental halls in support of 12 GeV Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) experimental demands. In particular, the near-future Measurement of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction (MOLLER) experiment requires the additional capacity provided by ESR2. This new cryoplant consists of a 4.0 kW at 4.5-Kelvin cold box and a two-stage compressor system. The cold box and compressor equipment were received from the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project and are being refurbished to meet Jefferson Lab’s future operating needs. The ESR2 cryoplant includes a new, 50+ m long cold transfer line, bayonet-can, utility system, and control system. The paper describes the fabrication and installation challenges faced, mitigations adopted, and future work plans for the cryoplant.

Roy Frederick Schwitters

Roy Frederick Schwitters, who served as director of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project in Texas, died of cancer at his home on Orcas Island, Washington, on 10 January 2023.Roy Frederick SchwittersFERMILAB/AIP ESVA/PHYSICS TODAY COLLECTIONPPT|High resolutionAn eloquent and dynamic physicist who played a major role in the 1974 discovery of the ψ particle at SLAC and subsequently led construction of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), Schwitters was selected to direct the SSC project in 1989. He led that increasingly contentious project until October 1993, when it was canceled by the US Congress.Born on 20 June 1944 in Seattle and raised there, Schwitters developed an intense interest in physics during his undergraduate years at MIT, receiving his BS in 1966. He continued working in the laboratory of Louis Osborne, under whom he did his dissertation research on pion photoproduction and earned his PhD in 1971. His principal contribution to his thesis experiment (conducted at SLAC) was the development of a precision diamond target to produce polarized photons when struck by high-energy electrons.That experiment brought Schwitters to the attention of Burton Richter, who hired him as a postdoctoral researcher on the SPEAR electron–positron collider then under construction at SLAC. In the process of working on the design and implementation of the SLAC–LBL (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) solenoidal magnetic detector, he determined how to surround the interaction point with cylindrical wire spark chambers to measure tracks of charged particles emanating from electron–positron collisions.During the data analysis of a 1974 experiment on the collider and detector, Schwitters recognized that two runs at 3.1 GeV were far out of line, with cross sections that were 5–7 standard deviations higher than in other runs at that energy. He and others convinced Richter to remeasure that energy region in greater detail during a November weekend and discovered an extremely narrow resonance at 3.105 GeV that they dubbed the ψ particle—soon identified as a charm–anticharm quark pair. That surprise discovery was “easily the most thrilling event of our scientific lives,” recalled Schwitters.After serving as an assistant professor and then associate professor of physics at SLAC, he joined Harvard University as a professor of physics in 1979, remaining in that position until 1990. During the 1980s Schwitters applied his deep understanding of collider–detector design to the CDF project, for which he led its construction and served as associate director and cospokesperson from 1980 to 1988.In 1989 the Universities Research Association, manager of Fermilab, named Schwitters as the director designate in its successful application to become the SSC project’s management and operations contractor. Building the gargantuan, multibillion-dollar proton collider involved project-management challenges unlike any that high-energy physicists had ever encountered. Because of the political challenges of securing sufficient funding, Schwitters began spending much of his time in Washington, DC, lobbying on the project’s behalf.After the SSC cancellation in 1993, Schwitters assumed a position full time as S. W. Richardson Regents Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he stayed until he retired in 2020. There he returned to experimental high-energy-physics research, focusing on B-meson physics. He also organized the Maya Muon project, which employed particle detectors sensitive to penetrating cosmic-ray muons to examine the innards of a Mayan pyramid in Belize for interior voids. In 1996 he joined JASON, a group of scientists that advises the US government on national security matters, chairing its steering committee from 2005 to 2011.Schwitters was recognized with NSF’s prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award in 1980 and shared the 1996 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize of the American Physical Society for his contributions to experimental particle physics.An avid mountain climber, Schwitters served as a Mount Rainier guide during summers as an MIT undergraduate. In retirement he returned to the Pacific Northwest and Orcas Island, where he had deep family roots.Schwitters will be remembered as one of the principal figures who led high-energy physics into the collider era and pioneered the design of hermetic 4π detectors, which surround as much as possible of the solid angle around the collision point. His contributions have already had a lasting historical impact.© 2023 American Institute of Physics.

String Derived Z ′ Model at an Upgraded Superconducting Super Collider

String Derived Z ′ Model at an Upgraded Superconducting Super Collider

String Derived Z ′ Model at an Upgraded Superconducting Super Collider

String Derived Z ′ Model at an Upgraded Superconducting Super Collider

Michael Riordan; Lillian Hoddeson; Adrienne W. Kolb. Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider. xiii + 448 pp., illus., maps, bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. $40 (cloth).

Michael Riordan; Lillian Hoddeson; Adrienne W. Kolb. <i>Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider</i>. xiii + 448 pp., illus., maps, bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. $40 (cloth).

John David Jackson

John David Jackson, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, whose magisterial textbook Classical Electrodynamics has shaped graduate education for more than a half century, died on 20 May 2016 in Lansing, Michigan. His wide-ranging theoretical work combined fine craftsmanship, intuition born of meticulous scholarship, engagement with experiment, and respect for practical matters. He was a wise counselor and a tireless advocate for human rights and academic freedom.John David JacksonNAN JACKSONPPT|High resolutionBorn on 19 January 1925 in London, Ontario, Canada, Jackson earned his BSc in honors physics and mathematics at the University of Western Ontario in 1946. The undergraduate curriculum’s emphasis on electromagnetism pointed him toward MIT and its Research Laboratory of Electronics. His initial graduate research, carried out with Lan Jen Chu, concerned a field theory of traveling-wave tubes.Victor Weisskopf’s quantum mechanics course introduced Jackson to modern physics and attracted him to Weisskopf’s nuclear theory group. With postdoc John Blatt, Jackson analyzed low-energy nucleon–nucleon scattering; for his dissertation in 1949 he used Julian Schwinger’s variational method to investigate S- and P-wave proton–proton scattering.Jackson was appointed in 1950 to the mathematics faculty at McGill University, where he continued research on atomic processes and nuclear reactions and began his career as a revered teacher and mentor. The lecture notes for his course on electricity and magnetism evolved into a first draft of the famous textbook.In 1956–57 Jackson spent a sabbatical year at Princeton University and was free to focus on research. A New York Times account of Luis Alvarez and collaborators’ observation of muon-catalyzed fusion, and the prospect it raised of a new energy source, stirred his imagination. Within a week, Jackson estimated that one muon could catalyze no more than 130 deuterium–tritium fusion reactions, insufficient for practical energy production. That work led him to form lasting bonds with other “Mu-sketeers,” Russian physicists who pioneered and extended muon-catalysis theory. Following Chien-Shiung Wu and coworkers’ discovery of parity nonconservation in beta decay, Jackson, Sam Treiman, and William Wyld analyzed possible signatures for violations of time-reversal invariance.Jackson moved in 1957 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Inspired, he claimed, by the majesty of Midwestern thunderstorms, he developed the fearsome “Jackson problems” and in 1962 published the first edition of Classical Electrodynamics. His research interests included low-energy kaon–nucleon scattering, final-state interactions, and dispersion relations.A 1963–64 sabbatical at CERN in Geneva marked another decisive turn in Jackson’s research career. With Kurt Gottfried, he devised incisive methods to elucidate production mechanisms of resonances in two-body to two-body reactions. Insights they gained from the phenomenological analysis of resonances led them to develop the peripheral model with absorption of low partial waves to describe resonance production.Jackson joined the Berkeley faculty and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory staff in 1967, when the ascendancy of Regge theory put his beloved special functions at the heart of theoretical physics. Lecturing graduate students in 1968, and having covered every blackboard in the room with arcane calculations that culminated in Legendre functions of the second kind, he mused, “Born a century too late!”As leader of the Theory Year program at Fermilab in 1972–73, Jackson founded a lab institution, the Joint Experimental–Theoretical “Wine & Cheese” Seminar.Back at Berkeley, Jackson was in at the very beginning of the “November Revolution” of 1974. Alerted by colleagues to the discovery-in-progress of the ψ resonance in electron–positron annihilations at SLAC, he deduced in real time that the new particle was astonishingly narrow—with a total width less than 100 keV. Drawing on his broad scientific culture, he provided diverse insights into polarization in electron storage rings and the nature of the charmonium and upsilon families of heavy mesons.Jackson served the physics community at Berkeley and around the world in many ways. An early proponent of the Superconducting Super Collider, he served for two years as deputy director of operations for the SSC Central Design Group. He edited the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science for 17 years.Jackson became a naturalized US citizen in 1988. The American Association of Physics Teachers established the John David Jackson Award for Excellence in Graduate Physics Education in 2010. A certificate conferring the title of Honorary Woman, presented by female graduate students in recognition of his outstanding achievements as department chair, hung on his living room wall for three decades.After his formal retirement in 1993, Jackson remained active in research and community service, and he published numerous articles on pedagogical insights and physics history. Throughout his life he enjoyed mountain photography and listening to jazz.Dave’s colleagues and students recall with affection the twinkle in his eyes conveying the joy of insight, his uncompromising standards, and his generous spirit. We celebrate his example as a physicist, teacher, and humane world citizen.© 2016 American Institute of Physics.

The supercollider that wasn't Tunnel Visions The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb University of Chicago Press, 2015. 462 pp.

An ambitious history of the SSC falls short on lessons for future megascience projects

The Superconducting Supercollider and US Science Policy

Reasons for the Superconducting Supercollider’s (SSC’s) termination include significant changes in the attitude of the government towards large scientific projects originating with management reforms introduced decades earlier. In the 1980s, the government insisted on inclusion of elements of these reforms in the SSC’s management contract, including increased demands for accountability, additional liability for contractors, and sanctions for infractions. The SSC’s planners could not have opted out of the reforms, which were by then becoming part of all large publicly funded projects. Once these reforms were in place, management mistakes in the SSC’s planning and construction became highly visible, leading to termination of the machine. This episode contains two key lessons about science policy. One is that the momentum of the government’s management reforms was unstoppable, and its impact on large scientific facilities and projects could not be reversed. The other is that specific measures such as cost and schedule-tracking systems to provide measures of program performance and impact were also inevitable; large scientific projects needed new parameters of accountability and transparency in what can be called the Principle of Assurance.

Conceptual Design of the JLab Hall D Replacement Solenoid

The 12 GeV upgrade at Jefferson Lab includes plans for a new solenoid that will replace the existing solenoid made with the Large Aperture Superconducting Solenoid (LASS) coils from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The conceptual design for the replacement solenoid presented here includes the magnetic design, winding arrangement, conductor selection, quench detection, and protection and cooling scheme. The magnetic design implements three separate coils to provide a 3.8 T field parallel to the beam direction and addresses the fringe field requirements of the facility while integrating into the existing iron yoke. The conductor consists of Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) cable (Nb-Ti) soldered into a copper channel stabilizer. The conductor is layer wound the hard way onto individual internal mandrels. The quench protection system implements a dump resistor and switch. Results from a 3-D quench code are provided for quench initiating at different locations. The magnet is conduction cooled by natural circulation of two-phase helium through cooling tubes mounted at the Outside Diameter (OD) of the cold mass.

Giants all around — apart from the squid

Giants all around — apart from the squid

Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science (review)

Reviewed by: Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science Catherine Westfall (bio) Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science. By Park Doing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. viii+152. $28. In the last twenty years, the U.S. Department of Energy, which funds most accelerator-based science, has spent about $2 billion annually to operate and construct facilities, mostly accelerators serving various disciplines. Although funding has remained high (and in fact, has increased with the 2006 construction of the $1.3 billion Spallation Neutron Source) a sea change has occurred: in 1980 the most expensive accelerators were for particle physics; in 2010, the most expensive accelerators, like the Spallation Neutron Source, were for investigating biological and other materials. Given the magnitude of the investment we should understand this change and how it has affected federally sponsored knowledge production. A few of us have begun the task, working from a historical perspective. It was welcome news that this book appeared with a description from a sociological point of view of the shift away from particle physics at Cornell University’s synchrotron, one of the smaller U.S. laboratories funded by the National Science Foundation. Park Doing explains that his aim was to investigate “whether the product of scientific practice . . . is contingent on that practice” (p. 22). To find out, he gathered information for eight years in the 1990s as an accelerator operations employee at Cornell, making observations and conclusions by going “back and forth between the working world of the laboratory and the world of philosophical reflection on that work” (p. 39). In particular he focused on three episodes with physicists, operators, and biologists to explore “epistemic politics,” that is, the way in which “technical knowledge claims are implicated in modes of authority, access and control” (pp. 1–2). He concludes that “resources and access were renegotiated and put to use in new, enduring ways with regard to technical and scientific assertions amid changing relations of authority and control.” In particular, he observes “fundamental changes in the epistemic-political fabric of scientific [End Page 431] practice,” as the laboratory was realigned from physics toward biology. Nonetheless he finds that “change was not implicated in the epistemic status of the products of that practice” (p. 143). Instead, Doing sees a “velvet revolution,” reminiscent of that in Czechoslovakia: Instead of “top down” change, “work was required on the part of the people and groups involved to assert an[d] maintain newly accepted ways of knowing that belied the seeming effortlessness of the regime change” (p. 140). Doing, a sociologist of science, situates his arguments within that field’s discussion. Historians interested in the development of multidisciplinary large-scale science will find helpful insights. For example, the notion of epistemic politics can inform investigation of complex negotiations in multidisciplinary experimentation such as those on the floor of the new large materials science accelerators. As we try to unravel what happens there, it is indeed useful to keep in mind that what various groups deem to be knowledge indeed shapes all matter of discourse, equipment, decision making, and outcomes. For his part, Doing could use help from historians. Although I was impressed with his decision to connect the Cornell case to larger trends, I was disappointed at how much he got wrong about the outside world. The Advanced Photon Source is at Argonne, not at Fermilab; the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is not a replacement for the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) but a different type of accelerator. Moreover, accelerator building did not stop in the 1990s, and the rise of the new large accelerators did not result from growing disfavor of particle physics. In fact, the large accelerators of the 1990s and 2000s got approval thanks to SSC proponents, who hoped that the development of these projects would stem criticism and competition harmful to the SSC’s prospects. Finally, accelerator-based science did not shift from “physics” to “biology,” but from particle physics to materials science, with studies of biological materials being an important part of a mix that also included (and arguably was dominated by) condensed-matter physics. Doing’s mistakes create doubt that he truly...

Imaginary Part of Action, Future Functioning as Hidden Variables

Beginning with a review the logically first stages in the project of Random Dynamics, hoping for all laws nature being emergent, we also review what can be considered a consequence of Random Dynamics, a model—by myself and Masao Ninomiya—, which in principle predicts the initial conditions in such a way as to minimize a certain functional of the history of the Universe through both past and future. This functional is indeed the imaginary part of the action, which exists (only) in our model of complex action. The main point of the present is to suggest this complex action model to be also helpfull in solving some problems for quantum mechanics. Especially as our model almost makes it possible in principle to calculate the full history of the universe, it even makes it in principle calculable, which one among several measurement results in a quantum experiment will actually be realized!Our “complex action model” thus is a special case of superdeterminism—in Bells way—and does not have true causality, but rather even in some cases true backward causation. In fact we claim in our model that the SSC(Superconducting Supercollider) were stopped by the US Congress due to the backward causation from the big amounts of Higgs particles, which it would have produced, if it had been allowed to run. The noumenon (“das Ding an sich”) in our model is the Feyman path integrand or better some fundamental quantities determined from second order effects of the latter integrand. The quantum mechanics interpretation here is strongly similar to the much criticized “transactional interpretation” by John Cramer (Rev. Mod. Phys. 58:647–688, 1986), but we might respond to some of the criticism.

TEST OF EFFECT FROM FUTURE IN LARGE HADRON COLLIDER: A PROPOSAL

We have previously proposed the idea of performing a card-drawing experiment of which the outcome potentially decides whether the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should be closed or not. The purpose is to test theoretical models such as our own model that have an action with an imaginary part that has a similar form to the real part. The imaginary part affects the initial conditions not only in the past but even from the future. It was speculated that all the accelerators producing large amounts of Higgs particles such as the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would mean that the initial conditions must have been arranged so as not to allow these accelerators to work. If such effects existed, we could perhaps cause a very clear-cut "miracle" by having the effect of a drawn card to be the closure of the LHC. Here we shall, however, argue that the closure of an accelerator is hardly needed to demonstrate such an effect and seek to calculate how one could perform a verification experiment for the proposed type of effect from the future in the statistically least disturbing and least harmful way. We shall also discuss how to extract the maximum amount of information about such as effect or model in the unlikely case that a card preventing the running of the LHC or the Tevatron is drawn, by estimating the relative importance of high beam energy or high luminosity for the purpose of our effect.

Kuhn, Popper, and the Superconducting Supercollider

The demise of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) is often explained in terms of the strain that it placed on the federal budget of the United States, and change in national security interests with the end of the Cold War. Recent work by Steve Fuller provides a framework to re-examine this episode in epistemological terms using the work of Kuhn and Popper. Using this framework, it is tempting to explain the demise as resulting from the overly Kuhnian character of its proponents, who supposedly argued for its construction by appealing to the importance of testing the predictions of a specific paradigm (i.e. the Standard Model). On this reading, the SSC case appears as an example of how Kuhn’s paradigm-driven view of science was invoked to keep science closed and autonomous from society. I argue that the SSC episode should not be viewed as giving support to the displacement of Kuhn’s view of science for Popper’s, and that such a displacement is detrimental to the project of integrating discussion on science into the public sphere. Drawing upon Rouse and Wimsatt, I argue that understanding paradigms as practices blunts some criticisms against Kuhn’s model, and that his model should play an important epistemological role in the aforementioned project.

The Supercollider: The Texas Days — A Personal Recollection of Its Short Life and Demise

This article is the second in a two-part account of the history of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The narrative starts with the move of the SSC activities to its Waxahachie site in Texas and the subsequent organization of its administrative structure. The technical design changes incorporated into the site-specific design are described together with their impact on costs. The principal activities at the SSC — technical progress, conventional construction and planning of the experimental program — are described briefly. The article then discusses the efforts to obtain international collaboration, the growth of the opposition both among the public at large and in Congress, and the final events leading to termination of the SSC. It ends with some subjective views on what went wrong with the SSC and on the prospects for construction of large scientific facilities in the US in the future.

The Supercollider: The Pre-Texas Days — A Personal Recollection of Its Birth and Berkeley Years

This article describes the beginnings of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The narrative starts in the early 1980s with the discussion of the process that led to the recommendation by the US high energy physics community to initiate work on a multi-TeV hadron collider. The article then describes the formation in 1984 of the Central Design Group (CDG) charged with directing and coordinating the SSC R&amp;D and subsequent activities which led in early 1987 to the SSC endorsement by President Reagan. The last part of the article deals with the site selection process, steps leading to the initial Congressional appropriation of the SSC construction funds and the creation of the management structure for the SSC Laboratory.

Lessons learned with the mark II drift chamber and some early work on supercollider tracking

I describe aspects of the design, performance, and achievements of the Mark II drift chamber, and some design considerations for tracking at the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC). The emphasis is mainly on contributions made by Abe Seiden and his group at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

No reserved communication lanes for high energy

The American particle physics community is in jeopardy and may end up drowning in a boundless sea trying to grasp at non-existing funds, dragging US physics and science as a whole to the bottom. This is a price the most powerful and high-tech country of the world cannot afford, as warned by the editors of a report published in late April by the National Academy of Sciences1. Behind so much alarm is the International Linear Collider (ILC) – a large particle accelerator facility which, according to the report, should be built on American territory, if research on the elementary constituents of nature is to survive in the United States. The ILC will probably cost a total of five hundred million dollars in the first five years, whereas billions will have to be invested in the subsequent seven years. Hardly impressive, however, if compared with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the biggest and costliest machine ever conceived in the history of science. Devised to describe the first instants of the universe, as many will recall, the SSC project was severely hampered by political and bureaucratic plots in 1993, when the Clinton administration decided to halt work on the accelerator, after ten years and approximately two billion dollars already spent.

Characterization of Eagle Ford Shale

This paper presents the synthesized and characterized properties of Eagle Ford Shale (EFS) based on the collected data and laboratory testing results from the canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) site in Texas, USA. Index and mechanical properties of the clay shale were summarized and analyzed statistically. Correlations between index and mechanical properties were established. The estimated shear strength of the intact shale was based on the results of drained triaxial compression and extension tests. The results from uniaxial compression test on vertical and inclined cores and from the triaxial compression and extension tests show that the shale has strength anisotropy. Shear strength along the discontinuities was estimated based on the results from direct shear and triaxial tests on samples with preexisting joints. Constitutive models and bounds of drained shear strengths were evaluated and proposed for intact clay shale, bedding planes, and discontinuities. The information on strength parameters and discontinuities can be used as the basis of future design and numerical studies.

Timothy Edward Toohig

Timothy Edward Toohig