Superconducting Super Collider Lecture by Cyrous Rostamzadeh

Presented to the SEM IEEE EMC Society on 11-17.2022
Topic: The Superconducting Super Collider
The Superconducting Super Collider, the largest scientific project ever attempted fell to the axe of Congressional budget cutters in 1993. The SSC was an epic project that ended in failure. An accelerator that would collide high-energy protons, the SSC’s ring was to be 87.1 kilometers in circumference, circling the small town of Waxahachie, Texas, 48 kilometers south of Dallas. At 20 TeV — close to the regime of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays—it was to have 20 times the collision energy of any existing or planned machine; it would have had five times the energy of even today’s LHC collisions. That design had only one tenth the beam luminosity of the LHC, but because of its higher energy, enough
to have found the Higgs and with the higher energy necessary to detect what, if anything, lies past the Higgs energy, such as supersymmetric or dark matter constituents. When canceled, about 20 percent of the SSC was complete—specifically, two dozen kilometers of tunnel had been drilled with 17 access shafts, and 18,600 square meters of buildings erected. Over $2 billion had already been spent, mostly by the DoE, but also $400 million by the state of Texas.
The U.S. has yet to stride again its own once prominent footsteps; but perhaps worse, it no longer dares to dream in color. Whatever the future for high-energy physics the U.S. and the world, the hulking beast that would have been the Superconducting Super Collider will not soon be forgotten