Accelerators for Future Lepton Colliders

Particle accelerators that collide electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, instead of protons, such as the LHC, are considered precision instruments. In this context, there are currently two projects, still in phase study, to build a linear collider: the ILC (International Linear Collider) and the CLIC (Compact Linear Collider).

Both ILC and CLIC consist of two confronted linear accelerators with a length in the order of tens of kilometers – 30 km ILC and 50 km CLIC-. During its operation, ‘packets’ of electrons and positrons will collide at its center thousands of times per second at an energy ranging from the 250 GeV of ILC to the 3 TeV of CLIC. These collisions will create new particles that will be registered in the detectors and will provide valuable data to accurately measure the properties of particles such as the Higgs boson, or the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle. It could also shed light on new areas of physics like dark matter.

The IFIC accelerator group, in collaboration with CERN, has been involved in the development of CLIC beam position monitors (BPM, Beam Position Monitors) and also in the study and development of high gradient accelerating cavities in X-Box facilities at CERN. A possible contribution to the construction of ILC’s beam instrumentation is currently being studied if the construction of the accelerator were to go ahead