Background
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful existing high-energy particle collider, is able to perform proton-proton collisions at a maximal energy of 14 TeV. Since protons are not elementary particles, and consist of quarks, gluons and virtual quark-antiquark pairs, the center-of-mass energy of elementary particle collisions in the LHC cannot be precisely determined. The absence of precise knowledge of a collision’s initial conditions makes the analysis of the data collected at the LHC very challenging. On the other hand, electrons and positrons are elementary particles, so e+e− colliders can be used to determine parameters with a much higher precision than proton colliders.
CLIC is a proposed future e+e- collider, designed to perform electron-positron collisions at energies from 0.5 to 5 TeV, with a nominal design optimized for 3 TeV. It could be used for precise energy scans of the regions in which the LHC might detect particles such as the Higgs boson or sparticles. Additionally, CLIC operating at an energy of 3 TeV reaches a higher effective center-of-mass energy than the LHC for elementary particle collisions (energies over 2 TeV for parton collisions at the LHC are very improbable due to the parton distribution function). Hence, with help of CLIC a new energy region can be explored which is unreachable by the LHC. This allows the detection of new particles and the testing of such models as supersymmetry, Higgs strong interactions, contact interactions and extra dimensions.
Read more about this topic: Compact Linear Collider
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