One of the most expensive and ambitious pieces of scientific equipment in mankind's history, the Large Hadron Collider, has set records, but been fraught with problems.  Now, even as operations and analysis of the $9B USD collider start to get back on course, scientists are developing a new collider that will deliver more precise measurements and new insights into the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

The International Linear Collider (ILC) as proposed would stretch 31 kilometers (19 miles, versus the 17-mile circumference of the LHC), with 14,000 electron-positron collisions per second at 500 GeV. That would essentially make it a linear version of the LHC and the world's largest linear collider by far, surpassing the 2-mile-long, 50 GeV Stanford Linear Accelerator.

The new collider will provide unique advantages when colliding electrons and positrons (anti-electrons), which are much lighter than the protons used in the LHC. Circular colliders like the LHC are valuable in that there's no waste of particles -- particles in the beam that "miss" colliding the first time spin back around and eventually will connect.  The downside is that by traveling a circular track, the precision of measurements is reduced due to synchrotron radiation, which worsens as the particles get smaller.  This means that circular accelerators are best suited for large particles like proton beams.

Linear colliders like the ILC offer a straight shot.  If some particles miss, they will be lost.  However, the particles will be delivered at full energy, allowing for collisions of smaller particles like the electron-positron pair at a higher level of measurement.

The ILC will use new superconducting radio frequency technology devices recently developed to create these energy levels. Traditionally, accelerators used copper RF cavities that are readily fabricated but suffer large power losses due to induced surface currents. These new superconducting cavities reduce the energy losses to nearly zero. Approximately 16,000 superconducting accelerating cavities made of pure niobium will be used, operating at 2 K (-271.2 °C or -456 °F).

The device is competing with a separately planned CERN linear accelerator dubbed the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC).  The CLIC would be much shorter, but much higher energy.  Whereas the ILC would offer electron beams of 500 GeV, with an upgrade option to 1 TeV, the CLIC would offer basic beam strength of 3 TeV, with an upgrade option to 5 TeV (by contrast the LHC offers beam strength of 7 TeV for a proton beam).

The problem with the CLIC is feasibility.  An immense alternating electric field is necessary to sustain the powerful, compact design.  Current technology falls short of being able to produce and safely utilize such a field.  The ILC, on the other hand, is less of a dramatic departure from previous designs.

CERN researcher and Director of the Accélérateur Linéaire Laboratory at Orsay (LAL), Guy Wormser will present at the International Conference on High Energy Physics today in Paris about the new design.  He states to the UK's Mail Online, "[W]e made a machine which allowed us to make a big leap in understanding, a sort of enlightener, and now we study and detail things and that's the linear collider.  It's the future of our discipline."

Regardless of which design is ultimately selected and funded -- the ILC or CLIC -- CERN almost certainly hopes to avoid public relations nightmares like the over-year-long shutdown and $40M USD that the LHC endured.  However, when venturing into unexplored territory mistakes are bound to occur.  One can only hope they are met with understanding from the public that is ultimately funding these devices, via taxes.

There are large numbers of spin-off technologies involved that will be commercialized. A new generation of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) machines use of medical imaging could be developed, while the large area particle detection systems developed for ILC experiments could provide an effective technology for cargo container inspections either through X-ray excitation or using naturally occurring cosmic radiation.

Although scientists working for CERN are also taking an active role in the ILC project, it is by no means solely a CERN project. Nearly 300 laboratories and universities around the world are involved in the ILC project. Over 700 people are working on the accelerator design itself, while another 900 people are working on detector development.

The U.S. is contributing 10-20% of the estimated $12 billion+ cost, but Japan, China, India and Russia are likely to join the EU as partners. The location of the ILC has not yet been decided, but Fermilab in Illinois is a contender, along with other sites in Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Russia.

The proposal for the ILC came together from three projects: the Next Linear Collider (NLC), the Global Linear Collider (GLC), and the Teraelectronvolt Energy Superconducting Linear Accelerator (TESLA).