Science Policy – ParticleBites

January 25, 2024January 25, 2024

What comes after the LHC? – The P5 Report & Future Colliders

This is the second part of our coverage of the P5 report and its implications for particle physics. To read the first part, click here

One of the thorniest questions in particle physics is ‘What comes after the LHC?’. This was one of the areas people were most uncertain what the P5 report would say. Globally, the field is trying to decide what to do once the LHC winds down in ~2040 While the LHC is scheduled to get an upgrade in the latter half of the decade and run until the end of the 2030’s, the field must start planning now for what comes next. For better or worse, big smash-y things seem to capture a lot of public interest, so the debate over what large collider project to build has gotten heated. Even Elon Musk is tweeting (X-ing?) memes about it.

Famously, the US’s last large accelerator project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), was cancelled in the ’90s partway through its construction. The LHC’s construction itself often faced perilous funding situations, and required a CERN to make the unprecedented move of taking a loan to pay for its construction. So no one takes for granted that future large collider projects will ultimately come to fruition.

Desert or Discovery?

When debating what comes next, dashed hopes of LHC discoveries are top of mind. The LHC experiments were primarily designed to search for the Higgs boson, which they successfully found in 2012. However, many had predicted (perhaps over-confidently) it would also discover a slew of other particles, like those from supersymmetry or those heralding extra-dimensions of spacetime. These predictions stemmed from a favored principle of nature called ‘naturalness’ which argued additional particles nearby in energy to the Higgs were needed to keep its mass at a reasonable value. While there is still much LHC data to analyze, many searches for these particles have been performed so far and no signs of these particles have been seen.

These null results led to some soul-searching within particle physics. The motivations behind the ‘naturalness’ principle that said the Higgs had to be accompanied by other particles has been questioned within the field, and in New York Times op-eds.

No one questions that deep mysteries like the origins of dark matter, matter anti-matter asymmetry, and neutrino masses, remain. But with the Higgs filling in the last piece of the Standard Model, some worry that answers to these questions in the form of new particles may only exist at energy scales entirely out of the reach of human technology. If true, future colliders would have no hope of

A diagram of the particles of the Standard Model laid out as a function of energy. The LHC and other experiments have probed up to around 10^3 GeV, and found all the particles of the Standard Model. Some worry new particles may only exist at the extremely high energies of the Planck or GUT energy scales. This would imply a large large ‘desert’ in energy, many orders of magnitude in which no new particles exist. Figure adapted from here

The situation being faced now is qualitatively different than the pre-LHC era. Prior to the LHC turning on, ‘no lose theorems’, based on the mathematical consistency of the Standard Model, meant that it had to discover the Higgs or some other new particle like it. This made the justification for its construction as bullet-proof as one can get in science; a guaranteed Nobel prize discovery. But now with the last piece of the Standard Model filled in, there are no more free wins; guarantees of the Standard Model’s breakdown don’t occur until energy scales we would need solar-system sized colliders to probe. Now, like all other fields of science, we cannot predict what discoveries we may find with future collider experiments.

Still, optimists hope, and have their reasons to believe, that nature may not be so unkind as to hide its secrets behind walls so far outside our ability to climb. There are compelling models of dark matter that live just outside the energy reach of the LHC, and predict rates too low for direct detection experiments, but would be definitely discovered or ruled out by high energy colliders. The nature of the ‘phase transition’ that occurred in the very early universe, which may explain the prevalence of matter over anti-matter, can also be answered. There are also a slew of experimental ‘hints‘, all of which have significant question marks, but could point to new particles within the reach of a future collider.

Many also just advocate for building a future machine to study nature itself, with less emphasis on discovering new particles. They argue that even if we only further confirm the Standard Model, it is a worthwhile endeavor. Though we calculate Standard Model predictions for high energies, unless they are tested in a future collider we will not ‘know’ how if nature actually works like this until we test it in those regimes. They argue this is a fundamental part of the scientific process, and should not be abandoned so easily. Chief among the untested predictions are those surrounding the Higgs boson. The Higgs is a central somewhat mysterious piece of the Standard Model but is difficult to measure precisely in the noisy environment of the LHC. Future colliders would allow us to study it with much better precision, and verify whether it behaves as the Standard Model predicts or not.

Projects

These theoretical debates directly inform what colliders are being proposed and what their scientific case is.

Many are advocating for a “Higgs factory”, a collider of based on clean electron-positron collisions that could be used to study the Higgs in much more detail than the messy proton collisions of the LHC. Such a machine would be sensitive to subtle deviations of Higgs behavior from Standard Model predictions. Such deviations could come from the quantum effects of heavy, yet-undiscovered particles interacting with the Higgs. However, to determine what particles are causing those deviations, its likely one would need a new ‘discovery’ machine which has high enough energy to produce them.

Among the Higgs factory options are the International Linear Collider, a proposed 20km linear machine which would be hosted in Japan. ILC designs have been ‘ready to go’ for the last 10 years but the Japanese government has repeated waffled on whether to approve the project. Sitting in limbo for this long has led to many being pessimistic about the projects future, but certainly many in the global community would be ecstatic to work on such a machine if it was approved.

Designs for the ILC have been ready for nearly a decade, but its unclear if it will receive the greenlight from the Japanese government. Image source

Alternatively, some in the US have proposed building a linear collider based on a ‘cool copper’ cavities (C3) rather than the standard super conducting ones. These copper cavities can achieve more acceleration per meter than the standard super conducting ones, meaning a linear Higgs factory could be constructed with a reduced 8km footprint. A more compact design can significantly cut down on infrastructure costs that governments usually don’t like to use their science funding on. Advocates had proposed it as a cost-effective Higgs factory option, whose small footprint means it could potentially hosted in the US.

The Future-Circular-Collider (FCC), CERN’s successor to the LHC, would kill both birds with one extremely long stone. Similar to the progression from LEP to the LHC, this new proposed 90km collider would run as Higgs factory using electron-positron collisions starting in 2045 before eventually switching to a ~90 TeV proton-proton collider starting in ~2075.

An image of the proposed FCC overlayed on a map of the French/Swiss border — Designs for the massive 90km FCC ring surrounding Geneva

Such a machine would undoubtably answer many of the important questions in particle physics, however many have concerns about the huge infrastructure costs needed to dig such a massive tunnel and the extremely long timescale before direct discoveries could be made. Most of the current field would not be around 50 years from now to see what such a machine finds. The Future-Circular-Collider (FCC), CERN’s successor to the LHC, would kill both birds with one extremely long stone. Similar to the progression from LEP to the LHC, this new proposed 90km collider would run as Higgs factory using electron-positron collisions starting in 2045 before eventually switching to a ~90 TeV proton-proton collider starting in ~2075. Such a machine would undoubtably answer many of the important questions in particle physics, however many have concerns about the extremely long timescale before direct discoveries could be made. Most of the current field would not be around 50 years from now to see what such a machine finds. The FCC is also facing competition as Chinese physicists have proposed a very similar design (CEPC) which could potentially start construction much earlier.

During the snowmass process many in the US starting pushing for an ambitious alternative. They advocated a new type of machine that collides muons, the heavier cousin of electrons. A muon collider could reach the high energies of a discovery machine while also maintaining a clean environment that Higgs measurements can be performed in. However, muons are unstable, and collecting enough of them into formation to form a beam before they decay is a difficult task which has not been done before. The group of dedicated enthusiasts designed t-shirts and Twitter memes to capture the excitement of the community. While everyone agrees such a machine would be amazing, the key technologies necessary for such a collider are less developed than those of electron-positron and proton colliders. However, if the necessary technological hurdles could be overcome, such a machine could turn on decades before the planned proton-proton run of the FCC. It can also presents a much more compact design, at only 10km circumfrence, roughly three times smaller than the LHC. Advocates are particularly excited that this would allow it to be built within the site of Fermilab, the US’s flagship particle physics lab, which would represent a return to collider prominence for the US.

A proposed design for a muon collider. It relies on ambitious new technologies, but could potentially deliver similar physics to the FCC decades sooner and with a ten times smaller footprint. Source

Deliberation & Decision

This plethora of collider options, each coming with a very different vision of the field in 25 years time led to many contentious debates in the community. The extremely long timescales of these projects led to discussions of human lifespans, mortality and legacy being much more being much more prominent than usual scientific discourse.

Ultimately the P5 recommendation walked a fine line through these issues. Their most definitive decision was to recommend against a Higgs factor being hosted in the US, a significant blow to C3 advocates. The panel did recommend US support for any international Higgs factories which come to fruition, at a level ‘commensurate’ with US support for the LHC. What exactly ‘comensurate’ means in this context I’m sure will be debated in the coming years.

However, the big story to many was the panel’s endorsement of the muon collider’s vision. While recognizing the scientific hurdles that would need to be overcome, they called the possibility of muon collider hosted in the US a scientific ‘muon shot‘, that would reap huge gains. They therefore recommended funding for R&D towards they key technological hurdles that need to be addressed.

Because the situation is unclear on both the muon front and international Higgs factory plans, they recommended a follow up panel to convene later this decade when key aspects have clarified. While nothing was decided, many in the muon collider community took the report as a huge positive sign. While just a few years ago many dismissed talk of such a collider as fantastical, now a real path towards its construction has been laid down.

Hitoshi Murayama, chair of the P5 committee, cuts into a ‘Shoot for the Muon’ cake next to a smiling Lia Merminga, the director of Fermilab. Source

While the P5 report is only one step along the path to a future collider, it was an important one. Eyes will now turn towards reports from the different collider advocates. CERN’s FCC ‘feasibility study’, updates around the CEPC and, the International Muon Collider Collaboration detailed design report are all expected in the next few years. These reports will set up the showdown later this decade where concrete funding decisions will be made.

For those interested the full report as well as executive summaries of different areas can be found on the P5 website. Members of the US particle physics community are also encouraged to sign the petition endorsing the recommendations here.

January 3, 2024January 3, 2024

The P5 Report & The Future of Particle Physics (Part 1)

Particle physics is the epitome of ‘big science’. To answer our most fundamental questions out about physics requires world class experiments that push the limits of whats technologically possible. Such incredible sophisticated experiments, like those at the LHC, require big facilities to make them possible, big collaborations to run them, big project planning to make dreams of new facilities a reality, and committees with big acronyms to decide what to build.

Enter the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (aka P5) which is tasked with assessing the landscape of future projects and laying out a roadmap for the future of the field in the US. And because these large projects are inevitably an international endeavor, the report they released last week has a large impact on the global direction of the field. The report lays out a vision for the next decade of neutrino physics, cosmology, dark matter searches and future colliders.

P5 follows the community-wide brainstorming effort known as the Snowmass Process in which researchers from all areas of particle physics laid out a vision for the future. The Snowmass process led to a particle physics ‘wish list’, consisting of all the projects and research particle physicists would be excited to work on. The P5 process is the hard part, when this incredibly exciting and diverse research program has to be made to fit within realistic budget scenarios. Advocates for different projects and research areas had to make a case of what science their project could achieve and a detailed estimate of the costs. The panel then takes in all this input and makes a set of recommendations of how the budget should be allocated, what should projects be realized and what hopes are dashed. Though the panel only produces a set of recommendations, they are used quite extensively by the Department of Energy which actually allocates funding. If your favorite project is not endorsed by the report, its very unlikely to be funded.

An computer generate graphic showing two sprays of particles being injected from a single center point — The P5 report also created an awesome graphic that contains symbolism for the different aspects of the plan. The left side depicts oscillating neutrinos and the shape of the Higgs potential. The right side depicts dark matter and the large scale structure of the universe. The central ball of light is supposed to represent discoveries of the unknown. Source

Particle physics is an incredibly diverse field, covering sub-atomic to cosmic scales, so recommendations are divided up into several different areas. In this post I’ll cover the panel’s recommendations for neutrino physics and the cosmic frontier. Future colliders, perhaps the spiciest topic, will be covered in a follow up post.

The Future of Neutrino Physics

For those in the neutrino physics community all eyes were on the panels recommendations regarding the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE is the US’s flagship particle physics experiment for the coming decade and aims to be the definitive worldwide neutrino experiment in the years to come. A high powered beam of neutrinos will be produced at Fermilab and sent 800 miles through the earth’s crust towards several large detectors placed in a mine in South Dakota. Its a much bigger project than previous neutrino experiments, unifying essentially the entire US community into a single collaboration.

DUNE is setup to produce world leading measurements of neutrino oscillations, the property by which neutrinos produced in one ‘flavor state’, (eg an electron-neutrino) gradually changes its state with sinusoidal probability (eg into a muon neutrino) as it propagates through space. This oscillation is made possible by a simple quantum mechanical weirdness: neutrino’s flavor state, whether it couples to electrons muons or taus, is not the same as its mass state. Neutrinos of a definite mass are therefore a mixture of the different flavors and visa versa.

Detailed measurements of this oscillation are the best way we know to determine several key neutrino properties. DUNE aims to finally pin down two crucial neutrino properties: their ‘mass ordering’, which will solidify how the different neutrino flavors and measured mass differences all fit together, and their ‘CP-violation’ which specifies whether neutrinos and their anti-matter counterparts behave the same or not. DUNE’s main competitor is the Hyper-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, another next-generation neutrino experiment with similar goals.

A depiction of the DUNE experiment. A high intensity proton beam at Fermilab is used to create a concentrated beam of neutrinos which are then sent through 800 miles of the Earth’s crust towards detectors placed deep underground South Dakota. Source

Construction of the DUNE experiment has been ongoing for several years and unfortunately has not been going quite as well as hoped. It has faced significant schedule delays and cost overruns. DUNE is now not expected to start taking data until 2031, significantly behind Hyper-Kamiokande’s projected 2027 start. These delays may lead to Hyper-K making these definitive neutrino measurements years before DUNE, which would be a significant blow to the experiment’s impact. This left many DUNE collaborators worried about its broad support from the community.

It came as a relief then when P5 report re-affirmed the strong science case for DUNE, calling it the “ultimate long baseline” neutrino experiment. The report strongly endorsed the completion of the first phase of DUNE. However, it recommended a pared-down version of its upgrade, advocating for an earlier beam upgrade in lieu of additional detectors. This re-imagined upgrade will still achieve the core physics goals of the original proposal with a significant cost savings. With this report, and news that the beleaguered underground cavern construction in South Dakota is now 90% complete, was certainly welcome holiday news to the neutrino community. This is also sets up a decade-long race between DUNE and Hyper-K to be the first to measure these key neutrino properties.

Cosmic Implications

While we normally think of particle physics as focused on the behavior of sub-atomic particles, its really about the study of fundamental forces and laws, no matter the method. This means that telescopes to study the oldest light in the universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), fall into the same budget category as giant accelerators studying sub-atomic particles. Though the experiments in these two areas look very different, the questions they seek to answer are cross-cutting. Understanding how particles interact at very high energies helps us understand the earliest moments of the universe, when such particles were all interacting in a hot dense plasma. Likewise, by studying the these early moments of the universe and its large-scale evolution can tell us about what kinds of particles and forces are influencing its dynamics. When asking fundamental questions about the universe, one needs both the sharpest microscopes and the grandest panoramas possible.

The most prominent example of this blending of the smallest and largest scales in particle physics is dark matter. Some of our best evidence for dark matter comes analyzing the cosmic microwave background to determine how the primordial plasma behaved. These studies showed that some type of ‘cold’, matter that doesn’t interact with light, aka dark matter, was necessary to form the first clumps that eventually seeded the formation of galaxies. Without it, the universe would be much more soup-y and structureless than what we see to today.

The “cosmic web” galaxy clusters from the Millenium simulation. Measuring and understanding this web can tell us a lot about the fundamental constituents of the universe. Source

To determine what dark matter is then requires an attack from two fronts: design experiments here on earth attempting directly detect it, and further study its cosmic implications to look for more clues as to its properties.

The panel recommended next generation telescopes to study the CMB as a top priority. The so called ‘Stage 4’ CMB experiment would deploy telescopes in both the south pole and Chile’s Atacama desert to better characterize sources of atmospheric noise. The CMB has been studied extensively before, but the increased precision of CMS-S4 could shed light on mysteries like dark energy, dark matter, inflation, and the recent Hubble Tension. Given the past fruitfulness of these efforts, I think few doubted the science case for such a next generation experiment.

A mockup of one of the CMS-S4 telescopes which will be based in the Chilean desert. Note the person for scale on the right (source)

The P5 report recommended a suite of new dark matter experiments in the next decade, including the ‘ultimate’ liquid Xenon based dark matter search. Such an experiment would follow in the footsteps of massive noble gas experiments like LZ and XENONnT which have been hunting for a favored type of dark matter called WIMP’s for the last few decades. These experiments essentially build giant vats of liquid Xenon, carefully shield from any sources of external radiation, and look for signs of dark matter particles bumping into any of the Xenon atoms. The larger the vat of Xenon, the higher chance a dark matter particle will bump into something. Current generation experiments have ~7 tons of Xenon, and the next generation experiment would be even larger. The next generation aims to reach the so called ‘neutrino floor’, the point as which the experiments would be sensitive enough to observe astrophysical neutrinos bumping into the Xenon. Such neutrino interactions would look extremely similar to those of dark matter, and thus represent an unavoidable background which would signal the ultimate sensitivity of this type of experiment. WIMP’s could still be hiding in a basement below this neutrino floor, but finding them would be exceedingly difficult.

A photo of the current XENONnT experiment. This pristine cavity is then filled with liquid Xenon and closely monitored for signs of dark matter particles bumping into one of the Xenon atoms. Credit: XENON Collaboration

WIMP’s are not the only dark matter candidates in town, and recent years have also seen an explosion of interest in the broad range of dark matter possibilities, with axions being a prominent example. Other kinds of dark matter could have very different properties than WIMPs and have had much fewer dedicated experiments to search for them. There is ‘low hanging fruit’ to pluck in the way of relatively cheap experiments which can achieve world-leading sensitivity. Previously, these ‘table top’ sized experiments had a notoriously difficult time obtaining funding, as they were often crowded out of the budgets by the massive flagship projects. However, small experiments can be crucial to ensuring our best chance of dark matter discovery, as they fill in the blinds pots missed by the big projects.

The panel therefore recommended creating a new pool of funding set aside for these smaller scale projects. Allowing these smaller scale projects to flourish is important for the vibrancy and scientific diversity of the field, as the centralization of ‘big science’ projects can sometimes lead to unhealthy side effects. This specific recommendation also mirrors a broader trend of the report: to attempt to rebalance the budget portfolio to be spread more evenly and less dominated by the large projects.

A pie chart comparing the budget porfolio in 2023 (left) versus the projected budget in 2033 (right). Currently most of the budget is being taken up by the accelerator upgrades and cavern construction of DUNE, with some amount for the LHC upgrades. But by 2033 the panel recommends a much more equitable balance between different research area.

What Didn’t Make It

Any report like this comes with some tough choices. Budget realities mean not all projects can be funded. Besides the pairing down of some of DUNE’s upgrades, one of the biggest areas that was recommended against were ‘accessory experiments at the LHC’. In particular, MATHUSULA and the Forward Physics Facility were two experiments that proposed to build additional detectors near already existing LHC collision points to look for particles that may be missed by the current experiments. By building new detectors hundreds of meters away from the collision point, shielded by concrete and the earth, they can obtained unique sensitivity to ‘long lived’ particles capable of traversing such distances. These experiments would follow in the footsteps of the current FASER experiment, which is already producing impressive results.

While FASER found success as a relatively ‘cheap’ experiment, reusing detector components from and situating itself in a beam tunnel, these new proposals were asking for quite a bit more. The scale of these detectors would have required new caverns to be built, significantly increasing the cost. Given the cost and specialized purpose of these detectors, the panel recommended against their construction. These collaborations may now try to find ways to pare down their proposal so they can apply to the new small project portfolio.

Another major decision by the panel was to recommend against hosting a new Higgs factor collider in the US. But that will discussed more in a future post.

Conclusions

The P5 panel was faced with a difficult task, the total cost of all projects they were presented with was three times the budget. But they were able to craft a plan that continues the work of the previous decade, addresses current shortcomings and lays out an inspiring vision for the future. So far the community seems to be strongly rallying behind it. At time of writing, over 2700 community members from undergraduates to senior researchers have signed a petition endorsing the panels recommendations. This strong show of support will be key for turning these recommendations into actual funding, and hopefully lobbying congress to even increase funding so that more of this vision can be realized.

And stayed tuned for part 2 of our coverage which will discuss the implications of the report on future colliders!

November 13, 2020November 16, 2020

“Diversity and inclusion:” a meta-look at ICHEP

Event: Diversity and Inclusion sessions at ICHEP 2020

Reference: https://indico.cern.ch/event/868940/sessions/352786/

This summer’s ICHEP conference, officially held in Prague but this time actually on screens around the world, had two sessions devoted to diversity and inclusion in HEP. We’d like to mention some highlights of the talks, trying to give an indicative look but certainly not exhaustive.

Presentations were given by the four large LHC experiments, the Belle II experiment and Valencia’s IFIC institute, five of which have dedicated “diversity offices.” Their talks presented statistics, internal poll results and accounts of activities. There was also coverage of two initiatives, THE Port humanitarian hackathons and Particle Physics Masterclasses for Girls, a contribution from the LGBTQ community at CERN, and a study on the pandemic impact for the US HEP Advisory Panel.

The main focus in terms of inclusion was gender, as the institutional presentations discussed a variety of statistics on the presence and role of women. In all of them the ratio of female members fell in the vicinity of 20% with an upward trend throughout the last decade. The statistics included details according to geographical regions and assigned responsibilities, which were in general corresponding to the overall ratio with some nuances. (One outlier that caught our eye was zero out of sixteen female speakers in the theory session of a regional meeting, which is compatible with our empirical estimation from other theory events.)

A few interesting points on gender inequality emerged from polls carried out by LHCb: out of the members who have dependents in their families (35% in total), 35% of women vs. 20% of men answered that this has made them decline a position of responsibility in the collaboration. At the same time, out of the members who used maternity or paternity leave, 41% of women vs. 0% of men found that their career took a step back after it.

Family and gender along with race showed up as imbalanced factors also in a study in Brazil, presented in the US HEP pandemic study, where different groups were found to be affected to different extents by the lockdown. Indicatively, submitting papers while working remotely tended to go better the more white, male, and without kids the author was.

Alongside numbers, the institutions talked about their inclusion activities, such as discussions and seminars, training for conveners, social media and real-world events on action dates. Tongue-in-cheek, it’d probably be fair to count the ROOT logo upgrade among them.

Inclusion and discrimination based on sexual identity was underscored by the presentation by LGBTQ CERN. It highlighted the CERN Informal Network’s not-all-rosy history and some public initiatives, like LGBTSTEM Day and IDAHOT. (It also included the catchy slogan “Without colors there’s no strong interaction.”)

Academia and research in large collaborations can be real ecosystems with their own issues, some of which – not traditionally present in the official discourse – seem to start emerging. These include being a newcomer, being geographically away from one’s experiment, the role of institutional affiliation, as well as social isolation and mental health. At the least, these topics now appear in the agendas of the collaborations. Student issues seem to be especially targeted: the “LHC Early Career Initiatives” provide workshops and networking, while the LHCb experiment pioneers dedicated introductory meetings and the “Starterkit” courses. Of course this is not to say that issues are exclusive to the young, as demonstrated by LHCb’s poll where the ratio of members who are dissatisfied with the work-life balance increases with seniority.

To close these highlights with some thinking outside the box, the inclusion activities of Belle II can be mentioned, which among other extend to lobbying for vegetarian food options and color blind-friendly screens in the control room.

The data might still be sparse and some bias systematic, but these discussions showed a growing trend for tackling issues in the world of HEP.

All presentations can be found at: https://indico.cern.ch/event/868940/sessions/352786/#all

August 15, 2016February 19, 2017

High Energy Physics: What Is It Really Good For?

Article: Forecasting the Socio-Economic Impact of the Large Hadron Collider: a Cost-Benefit Analysis to 2025 and Beyond
Authors: Massimo Florio, Stefano Forte, Emanuela Sirtori
Reference: arXiv:1603.00886v1 [physics.soc-ph]

Imagine this. You’re at a party talking to a non-physicist about your research.

If this scenario already has you cringing, imagine you’re actually feeling pretty encouraged this time. Your everyday analogy for the Higgs mechanism landed flawlessly and you’re even getting some interested questions in return. Right when you’re feeling like Neil DeGrasse Tyson himself, your flow grinds to a halt and you have to stammer an awkward answer to the question every particle physicist has nightmares about.

“Why are we spending so much money to discover these fundamental particles? Don’t they seem sort of… useless?”

Well, fair question. While us physicists simply get by with a passion for the field, a team of Italian economists actually did the legwork on this one. And they came up with a really encouraging answer.

The paper being summarized here performed a cost-benefit analysis of the LHC from 1993 to 2025, in order to estimate its eventual impact on the world at large. Not only does that include benefit to future scientific endeavors, but to industry and even the general public as well. To do this, they called upon some classic non-physics notions, so let’s start with a quick economics primer.

A cost benefit analysis (CBA) is a common thing to do before launching a large-scale investment project. The LHC collaboration is a particularly tough thing to analyze; it is massive, international, complicated, and has a life span of several decades.
In general, basic research is notoriously difficult to justify to funding agencies, since there are no immediate applications. (A similar problem is encountered with environmental CBAs, so there are some overlapping ideas between the two.) Something that taxpayers fund without getting any direct use of the end product is referred to as a non-use value.
When trying to predict the future gets fuzzy, economists define something called a quasi option value. For the LHC, this includes aspects of timing and resource allocation (for example, what potential quality-of-life benefits come from discovering supersymmetry, and how bad would it have been if we pushed these off another 100 years?)
One can also make a general umbrella term for the benefit of pure knowledge, called an existence value. This involves a sort of social optimization; basically what taxpayers are willing to pay to get more knowledge.

The actual equation used to represent the different costs and benefits at play here is below.

Let’s break this down by terms.

PVCu is the sum of operating costs and capital associated with getting the project off the ground and continuing its operation.

PVBu is the economic value of the benefits. Here is where we have to break down even further, into who is benefitting and what they get out of it:

Scientists, obviously. They get to publish new research and keep having jobs. Same goes for students and post-docs.
Technological industry. Not only do they get wrapped up in the supply chain of building these machines, but basic research can quickly turn into very profitable new ideas for private companies.
Everyone else. Because it’s fun to tour the facilities or go to public lectures. Plus CERN even has an Instagram now.

Just to give you an idea of how much overlap there really is between all these sources of benefit, Figure 1 shows the monetary amount of goods procured from industry for the LHC. Figure 2 shows the number of ROOT software downloads, which, if you are at all familiar with ROOT, may surprise you (yes, it really is very useful outside of HEP!)

**Figure 1:** Amount of money (thousands of Euros) spent on industry for the LHC. pCp is past procurement, tHp1 is the total high tech procurement, and tHp2 is the high tech procurement for orders > 50 kCHF.

Figure 2: Number of ROOT software downloads over time. — **Figure 2:** Number of ROOT software downloads over time.

The rightmost term encompasses the non-use value, which is the difference between the sum of the quasi-option value QOV0 and existence value EXV0. If it sounded hard to measure a quasi-option value, it really is. In fact, the authors of this paper simply set it to 0, as a worst case value.

The other values come from in-depth interviews of over 1500 people, including all different types of physicists and industry representatives, as well as previous research papers. This data is then funneled into a computable matrix model, with a cell for each cost/benefit variable, for each year in the LHC lifetime. One can then create a conditional probability distribution function for the NPV value using Monte Carlo simulations to deal with the stochastic variables.

The end PDF is shown in Figure 2, with an expected NPV of 2.9 billion Euro! This also shows a expected benefit/cost ratio of 1.2; a project is generally considered justifiable if this ratio is greater than 1. If this all seems terribly exciting (it is), it never hurts to contact your Congressman and tell them just how much you love physics. It may not seem like much, but it will help ensure that the scientific community continues to get projects on the level of the LHC, even during tough federal budget times.

Figure 2: Net present value PDF (left) and cumulative distribution (right). — **Figure 3:** Net present value PDF (left) and cumulative distribution (right).

Here’s hoping this article helped you avoid at least one common source of awkwardness at a party. Unfortunately we can’t help you field concerns about the LHC destroying the world. You’re on your own with that one.

Further Reading:

Another supercollider that didn’t get so lucky: The SSC story
More on cost-benefit analysis