Superconducting Super Collider

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) would have been the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex that was planned to be built mostly in Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference is 87.1 km (54 miles) and an energy of 20 TeV per beam, potentially enough energy to create a Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model, but not yet detected. The project's director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University. The project was canceled in 1993.

Development

The system was first envisioned in the December 1983 National Reference Designs Study, which examined the technical and economic feasibility of a machine with the design capacity of 20 TeV per beam. After an extensive Department of Energy review during the mid-1980s, a site selection process began in 1987. The project was awarded to Texas in November 1988 and major construction began in 1991. Seventeen shafts were sunk and 23.5 km (14.6 miles) of tunnel were bored by late 1993.

Cancellation

During the design and the first construction stage, a heated debate ensued about the high cost of the project. In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, but by 1993 the cost projection exceeded $12 billion. An especially recurrent argument was the contrast with NASA's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), which was of similar amount. Critics of the project argued that the US could not afford both of them.

A high-level schematic of the lab landscape during the final planning phases.

The project was canceled by the Congress in 1993. Many factors contributed to the shutdown of the project, although different parties disagree on which contributed the most. They include rising cost estimates, poor management by physicists and Department of Energy officials, the end of the need to prove the supremacy of American science with the collapse of the Soviet Union, belief that many smaller scientific experiments of equal merit could be funded for the same cost, Congress's desire to generally reduce spending, and the reluctance of Texas Governor Ann Richards and President Bill Clinton to support a project begun during the administrations of Richards's predecessor, Bill Clements, and Clinton's predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. However, in 1993, Clinton attempted to prevent the cancellation by requesting that Congress continue "to support this important and challenging effort" through completion because "abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science..." Despite Clinton's letter, Congress still cut all funding for the project.

The closing of the SSC held drastic ramifications for the southern part of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, and resulted in a mild recession made most evident in those parts of Dallas which lay south of the Trinity River. At the time the project was cancelled, 22.5 km (14 miles) of tunnel and 17 shafts to the surface were already dug and nearly two billion dollars had already been spent on the massive facility.

Comparison to the Large Hadron Collider

The SSC was designed to reach a higher energy than its recently completed European counterpart, the Large Hadron Collider (CERN, Geneva) with a planned collisions of 40 TeV versus 14 TeV.

The LHC is less expensive not only because of its smaller size, but also because of the already existing engineering infrastructure, built to host the previous accelerator Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which was hosted in a 27 km long underground cavern.

Current status of site

Entrance to the SSC site as of August 2008

After the project was canceled, the main site was deeded to Ellis County, Texas and the county tried numerous times to sell the property. The property was finally sold in August 2006 to an investment group led by the late J.B. Hunt. Collider Data Center has contracted with GVA Cawley to market the site as a tier III or tier IV data center. The site is currently unoccupied. However the site is occasionally used by the military to conduct training exercises. The site is generally well-maintained, with few (if any) broken windows, though some doors and locks have been forced open. Most of the signage (the most obvious artifact from the SSC era) has been removed since the closure of the project.

File:Ssc panorama.jpg

Panoramic view of the SSC site

Movie production

While owned by Ellis County, Texas, the site was used for several different purposes, including storage for the county and the production of Jimmy Wash's 1999 movie Universal Soldier: The Return.

See also

• Fermilab
• DESY

References

• The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman, Dick Teresi, ISBN 0-385-31211-3
• A Hole In Texas by Herman Wouk, Fiction, Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-52590-1
• The Dead Collider by Bruce Sterling, F&SF Science column #13 (July, 1994)
• A Tale of Two Cultures: Building the Superconducting Super Collider, 1988-1993 by Michael Riordan. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32(1), pp. 125–144 (Fall, 2001)
• The Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider by Michael Riordan. Physics in Perspective, 2(4), pp. 411–425 (December, 2000)
• The Superconducting Super Collider Project: A Summary, in High Energy Physics Advisory Panel's Subpanel on Vision for the Future of High Energy Physics, Sidney D. Drell, Chair. U.S. Department of Energy (May, 2004)
• The SSC Low Energy Booster (ed. H.-Ulrich Wienands) IEEE Press, 1997, ISBN 0-7803-1164-7

External links

• SSC website
• Tour [1]