by Dr Alain Blondel
(Geneva)
CERN is hosting the design study of Future Circular Colliders fitting in a new tunnel of 100km circumference around Geneva. A possible first step is the "Electroweak Factory", a high luminosity electron-positron (lepton) collider covering the energy range from the Z pole to above the top threshold, for the study of several TeraZ, okuW, MegaHiggs and Megatops. The tunnel would fit, as ultimate goal, a 100 TeV pp collider. The project will be described with special attention to the electron machine.
The combination of the two machines offers a remarkable potential for discoveries, from a blend of precision measurements, high statistics, high energies and sensitivity to very small couplings. In particular the search for sterile right-handed neutrinos (aka neutral heavy leptons), with mass up to the Z mass, will be shown to reach couplings as small as predicted by the see-saw limit.
About the speaker:
Alain Blondel is professor of Physics at University of Geneva. After a PhD on the Gargamelle neutrino experiment (1976-79) on charmed baryon production by neutrinos, he joined the SLAC-LBNL MarkII experiment where he participated in the observation of a long b lifetime (1979-1983) before joining the CDHS neutrino experiment at CERN on precision measurement of Neutral Current (1983-89). In the ALEPH experiment at LEP he led the measurement of the number of light neutrinos (1989) before engaging with the development of polarized beams for energy calibrations, from which the Z mass and width were measured -- allowing prediction of the top mass early 1994. He led the muon cooling R&D experiment MICE from inception to the completion of the first step (2000-2013).
In 2011 he proposed with Frank Zimmermann the high luminosity circular e+e- Higgs factory concept which is now proposed as CEPC/SPPC in China and of the FCC project at CERN.