Novel Ideas for Accelerators, Particle Detection and Data Challenges at Future Colliders

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About this Research Topic

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Background

This is a pivotal moment in science that may lead to a paradigm shift in particle physics with profound consequences in several other fields of research. New ground-breaking collider-based experiments are planned by the international high- and nuclear-physics communities, and cross-pollination with other areas of science will play a critical role in future discoveries.

Since the observation of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 at CERN laboratory, that led to the 2013 Nobel Prize to Prof. Peter Higgs and Prof. Francois Englert, a strategic plan is being developed by the communities of scientists in Europe, Americas and Asia that foresees new collider experiments that study the properties of the Higgs boson, i.e. Higgs Factories, look for anomalies in the wider realm of the Standard Model of particle physics by performing precision measurements, for example, in the electroweak sector, and push the energy reach of particle beams to explore the unknown. These new accelerator projects will follow the already approved High Luminosity run of the LHC (HL-LHC) that is planned to start in 2027 and is expected to conclude its data-taking period about ten years later. The most prominent proposals for Higgs Factories are the electron colliders. Among them, there are circular electron colliders, such as the Future Circular Collider e+e- (FCC-ee), the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), as well as linear electron colliders, such as the International Linear Collider (ILC) and Compact LInear Collider (CLIC). In recent years, another type of lepton collider, i.e. the muon collider, has attracted new and revived interests both as a Higgs Factory and as an energy frontier accelerator. Proton colliders are proposed as energy frontier machines, and will also allow the copious production of Higgs bosons. The most prominent proposals for proton colliders are the FCC hadron-hadron collider (FCC-hh) and the Super Proton Collider (SppC). Such proton colliders will generate unprecedented radiation levels in regions close to the collision points, making even more challenging the application of new technologies that have to be highly radiation tolerant. Several accelerators are proposed to collide electrons against hadrons, that will probe the inner structure of hadrons, and may also be sensitive to new physics; among them, most notable are the LHeC, the FCC-eh, and the Electron Ion Collider (EIC). The latter was recently approved by the U.S.A. Department of Energy and will start operations in a ten-year time scale to study nuclear interactions to unprecedented precision. Other interesting projects have been proposed, for example the photon-photon collider, the very high-energy electron collider etc.

These accelerator projects set very stringent requirements, for example in accelerator, particle detector technologies, readout and event triggering electronics, data transmission and computing, as well as in the algorithms for the reconstruction of collision events, particle identification and simulations. Advances in such technologies will not only make possible the realization of future particle physics experiments, but will also greatly benefit other areas of scientific research, industrial applications and, on a longer term, will have significant societal impact.

We invite reviews and original research papers on prospects for future accelerator-based experiments that focus on novel technologies that go beyond the state-of-the-art of their fields, and push the boundaries of innovation with the goal to make giant leaps forward in the understanding of what is currently unknown. We value contributions that emphasize the benefits and applications of such new concepts and ideas beyond the realm of high-energy and nuclear-physics. The topics can include, but are not limited to, the following list:
• Accelerators (including high-field magnets, RF cavities, etc.)
• Detectors (including trackers, calorimeters, timing detectors, monolithic detectors, quantum sensing etc.)
• Readout and data transmission electronics
• Computing architectures
• Hardware and software for event and particle reconstruction
• Simulations.

Keywords: particle physics, accelerator R&D, detector R&D, radiation tolerance, trigger and data acquisition systems, computing, particle identification and reconstruction, simulations

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