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Comment by Isinlor | Hacker News Reader

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Isinlor·

Given current predictions we would need colliders the size of the Solar System.

Something bigger than Neptune orbit.

We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)

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Now that you mention this, would an accelerator in space need walls? Could you make it from a series of big circles (maybe solenoids?) at distances of a million kilometers apart or so? Neptune's orbit is about 15 billion km long, so, you'd need about 15k of such loops. In free fall they would just go around the Sun, so you'd only need to maintain their perfect alignment with some minute adjustments.

Is there some reason to think that the only way to get higher energy collisions is by scaling the accelerators? Is there any possibility that we may be able to get to higher energies with earth-scale experiments?

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are possible candidate. For example, Oh-My-God particle had energy of a baseball traveling at 100 km/h. 40 million times higher than particle energies of terrestrial accelerators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

The limiting factor is the strength of magnetic fields you can achieve. The more momentum the particles have, the stronger a field you need to bend them into a circular orbit. The attainbale strength is determined by material properties and there is nothing to suggest that we can get orders of magnitude improvement here. The improvements have been quite linear for decades, see the figure here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01869-1

And you eventually run into rather fundamental problems of tearing your atoms apart with the magnetic field you create. But I am not up to speed on how close we actually are to these limits.

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