"Lepton collisions above 1 TeV are likely to be a big part of the future of particle physics and this is one possibility for doing that," said Steve Holmes, Associate Director for Accelerators. Discussion of a muon collider at the Snowmass '96 conference found the concept to be technically daunting, but new advances in cooling methods and magnet design have sparked renewed interest.

"The greatest challenge we face is how to 'cool' or focus the beam to maximize the luminosity," said Steve Geer, co-leader of the new task force with Vladimir Shiltsev. Two types of magnets must be developed: a helical solenoid, which can perform six-dimensional cooling, cooling both the particle's position and momentum in three dimensional space; and a final focusing magnet, which will need a field strength of about 50 Tesla, or some six times the strength of LHC magnets.

Plans for a preliminary cooling channel design concept, cooling channel R&D and component developing and testing are due by September 2006. Subsequent reports on research and testing will be due in September 2007, and the design concept will be revised in 2007 and again in 2008. R&D efforts planned for the ILC may also be useful: while the manner of providing collisions between muons and anti-muons is different than between electrons and positrons, the technology needed for accelerating on the beams could be the same. "We have good new ideas and good people are available. The time is right," said Shiltsev. "We will see just how realistic the future of this technology is."
--Ben Berger

The long, strange quest to build a U.S. underground lab has taken another unexpected turn. A year ago, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that only two locations remained in the running to house the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL)--which would conduct experiments in particle physics, geology, microbiology, and other fields (Science, 29 July 2005, p. 682). But last month, NSF reopened the site competition to all comers. The reversal was prompted by an appeal from a losing group, but that group has now decided not to reapply.
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