3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert Mayer Lecture Hall
A Muon Collider in the Future of Particle Physics
Simon Pagan Griso, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
The quest for learning the fundamental building blocks of matter and underlying laws of Nature has seen colliders playing a major role in the past century. Such projects have become complex international endeavours requiring multi-decade vision to be realized to their full potential.
With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN now operating until 2041, it is already time to think about the next generation colliders.
While studies towards a muon collider have been done for decades, at various degrees of emphasis, the feasibility studies towards an unprecedented high-energy (10 TeV) machine have ramped up and caught more and more attention in the last few years, fueled also by the current technology possibilities and the state of the field.
A Muon Collider offers the potential for a scalable path towards the next generation of high-energy frontier particle colliders with enormous physics discovery potential. At the same time, the short lifetime of the muon poses non-trivial technical challenges on both the accelerator and detector design.
The most recent US planning exercise (so-called, P5: Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel) report recognized the high-potential of such a machine and refers to that as "the muon shot".
The relatively compact design, compared to any other option, also offers the possibility of hosting such a collider on US soil (for instance on the Fermi National Laboratory site), which has contributed to increased domestic interest as well.
In this colloquium I will introduce the reasons why such a collider is an appealing option for the future of particle physics, I will give a brief overview of some of the key challenges that need to be addressed, and comment on the current status of the project.