Maury Tigner Cornell University The Highest Energy Particle Colliders

An introduction discussing the purpose and method for using high energy particle accelerators in exploring the most fundamental rules by which the world is put together will be given. Following will be a discussion of the most powerful accelerator under construction now, the LHC or Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. We’ll see how it works and get a feeling for what is involved in such a facility and what are the primary challenges. We’ll finish with a similar discussion for the International Linear Collider, a facility that is envisioned to be created by a global collaboration put together for the purpose and to operate concurrently with the LHC for a significant period. Interestingly, the use of accelerators in many branches of science from biology to nanotechnology is in an expansion phase. The synergy among all of these efforts will be discussed briefly.