Ultimate Colliders

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution and future prospects of energy frontier particle colliders, emphasizing technological advances, current major facilities, and the need for innovative approaches at ultra-high energies beyond current limits.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of collider developments, current limitations, and discusses the necessity for paradigm shifts in future high-energy physics research.

Findings

Current colliders operate at energies much higher than early instruments.

Technological and beam physics advances have significantly increased collider capabilities.

Future colliders face size, cost, and power challenges, requiring new paradigms.

Abstract

Our understanding of the Universe critically depends on the fundamental knowledge of particles and fields, which represents a central endeavor of modern high-energy physics. Energy frontier particle colliders - arguably, among the largest, most complex and advanced scientific instruments of modern times - for many decades have been at the forefront of scientific discoveries in high-energy physics. Due to technology advances and beam physics breakthroughs, the colliding beam facilities have progressed immensely and now operate at energies and luminosities many orders of magnitude greater than the pioneering instruments of the early 1960s. While the Large Hadron Collider and the Super-KEKB factory represent the frontier hadron and lepton colliders of today, respectively, future colliders are an essential component of a strategic vision for particle physics. Conceptual studies and technical developments for several exciting near- and medium-term future collider options are underway internationally. Analysis of numerous proposals and studies for far-future colliders indicate the limits of the collider beam technology due to machine size, cost, and power consumption, and call for a paradigm shift of the particle physics research at ultra-high energy but low luminosity colliders approaching or exceeding 1 PeV center-of-mass energy scale.