It is now officially a Higgs boson, but squeezing any more information out of the particle discovered last year looks tough. At least using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. With major hurdles to building a larger atom smasher, future colliders may be tabletop affairs that use exotic matter, rather than brute force, to hit the high energies needed.
In the LHC, two beams of protons zip around a 27-kilometre circular track that accelerates them to close to the speed of light. They collide to produce Higgs bosons, which quickly decay into other particles that the LHC detects. But the smash-ups also shatter the protons into component particles that confuse things. As a result, the LHC is unlikely to tease out properties of the Higgs boson that would help extend the standard model of particle physics, which is known to be wanting.
Beams of fundamental particles, such as electrons, wouldn't shatter, and so should provide more sensitive results. However, these don't do well in circular machines, and linear accelerators must be exceptionally long to hit the required energies. The International Linear Collider, a proposed LHC successor, would be 30 to 50 kilometres long, posing financial and technical challenges.
So teams at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, are exploring a technique called plasma wakefield acceleration, which could achieve these energies in something thousands of times smaller.
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