MACHINES that can boost particles to the huge energies needed to reveal
supersymmetry may be easier to build than physicists thought.
Teams in the US, Europe and Japan are all working on rival designs for the
next big linear accelerator, in which beams are accelerated from either end and
collide in the middle
(New Scientist, 31 March, p 6).
Till now, physicists
believed they would need a machine up to 25 kilometres long to get particles to
such high energies, but Pantaleo Raimondi and Andrei Seryi of the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center in California believe they can shrink it.…
