Design study for a staged Very Large Hadron Collider

Advancing accelerator designs and technology to achieve the highest energies has enabled remarkable discoveries in particle physics. This report presents the results of a design study for a new collider at Fermilab that will create exceptional opportunities for particle physics--a two-stage very large hadron collider. In its first stage, the machine provides a facility for energy-frontier particle physics research, at an affordable cost and on a reasonable time scale. In a second-stage upgrade in the same tunnel, the VLHC offers the possibility of reaching 100 times the collision energy of the Tevatron. The existing Fermilab accelerator complex serves as the injector, and the collision halls are on the Fermilab site. The Stage-1 VLHC reaches a collision energy of 40 TeV and a luminosity comparable to that of the LHC, using robust superferric magnets of elegant simplicity housed in a large-circumference tunnel. The Stage-2 VLHC, constructed after the scientific potential of the first stage has been fully realized, reaches a collision energy of at least 175 TeV with the installation of high-field magnets in the same tunnel. It makes optimal use of the infrastructure developed for the Stage-1 machine, using the Stage-1 accelerator itself as the injector. The goals of this study, commissioned by the Fermilab Director in November 2000, are: to create reasonable designs for the Stage-1 and Stage-2 VLHC in the same tunnel; to discover the technical challenges and potential impediments to building such a facility at Fermilab; to determine the approximate costs of the major elements of the Stage-1 VLHC; and to identify areas requiring significant R and D to establish the basis for the design