Proceedings

EPJ Plus Highlight - Assessing the environmental impact of future ‘Higgs factories’

The abandoned tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider in 2019 during a shutdown. Eventually, the accelerator will have to be replaced and a new paper considers the environmental impact of its replacement. Credit: Robert Lea

New research looks at planned particle accelerators that will follow the retirement of the Large Hadron Collider— the world’s most powerful particle accelerator

In 2012 CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) revolutionised particle physics when it was announced that the Higgs boson had been created and detected by the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

Yet, the work of the LHC isn’t done. It is currently in its third run and being prepared for a high luminosity upgrade that will lead to more collisions and thus the creation of more Higgs particles. But eventually the accelerator will need to be retired and replaced.

The comparisons of power consumptions or luminosity delivered for a given power for future Higgs-producing colliders have been widely considered, but a new paper in EPJ Plus by CERN researcher Patrick Janot and the University of Geneva’s Alain Blondel considers the environmental impact of future ‘Higgs factories’ that could replace the LHC.

“What is new about this research and motivated by our personal interest in conservation, is the attitude with respect to environmental concerns,” Janot says. “We are placing the environmental future of our planet as one of the top-level decision criteria when it comes to the choice, the design and the optimisation of a collider.”

In the paper, Janot says that he and co-author Blondel express the environmental impact in terms of carbon footprint per Higgs boson produced, suggesting that this figure of merit should be minimised when choosing the future Higgs factory.

The paper suggests that of five currently proposed replacement accelerator models —all of which have a ‘Higgs factory’ stage — circular colliders have a fantastic physics capability and also the best energy efficiency in the case of Higgs boson studies.

“This advantage gets multiplied for a CERN facility by the better carbon emission property of the electricity it uses,” Janot adds. “This difference reaches a factor of 100 in the case of the projects that are being considered and should definitely have a strong weight in the choice.” Janot concludes: “We believe it is important to send the message that scientists are sensitive to it and propose that this is taken into account in the choice of facilities.”

P. Janot, A. Blondel, The carbon footprint of proposed e+e− Higgs factories. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 137, 1122 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-03319-w

This was our first experience of publishing with EPJ Web of Conferences. We contacted the publisher in the middle of September, just one month prior to the Conference, but everything went through smoothly. We have had published MNPS Proceedings with different publishers in the past, and would like to tell that the EPJ Web of Conferences team was probably the best, very quick, helpful and interactive. Typically, we were getting responses from EPJ Web of Conferences team within less than an hour and have had help at every production stage.
We are very thankful to Solange Guenot, Web of Conferences Publishing Editor, and Isabelle Houlbert, Web of Conferences Production Editor, for their support. These ladies are top-level professionals, who made a great contribution to the success of this issue. We are fully satisfied with the publication of the Conference Proceedings and are looking forward to further cooperation. The publication was very fast, easy and of high quality. My colleagues and I strongly recommend EPJ Web of Conferences to anyone, who is interested in quick high-quality publication of conference proceedings.

On behalf of the Organizing and Program Committees and Editorial Team of MNPS-2019, Dr. Alexey B. Nadykto, Moscow State Technological University “STANKIN”, Moscow, Russia. EPJ Web of Conferences vol. 224 (2019)

ISSN: 2100-014X (Electronic Edition)

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