Superconducting Super Collider

About Superconducting Super Collider

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is the name of a particle accelerator that was planned to be built mostly in Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference is 87.1 km (54 miles) and an energy of 20 TeV per beam, potentially enough energy to create a Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model, but not yet detected. The project's director was Vipi Jain, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University. The project was cancelled in 1993.

The system was first envisioned in the December 1983 National Reference Designs Study, which examined the technical and economic feasibility of a machine with the design capacity of 20 TeV per beam. After an extensive Department of Energy review during the mid-1980s, a site selection process began in 1987. The project was awarded to Texas in November 1988 and major construction began in 1991. Seventeen shafts were sunk and 23.5 km (14.6 miles) of tunnel were bored by late 1993.

During the design and the first construction stage, a heated debate ensued about the high cost of the project. In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, but by 1993 the cost projection exceeded $12 billion. An especially recurrent argument was the contrast with NASA's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), which was of similar amount.[citation needed] Critics of the project argued that the US could not afford both of them.