Plans for the SSC

Reviews briefly the physics considerations which have led to the choice of the SSC as the priority of the U.S. community of physicists. In order to resolve the next level of physics questions as proposed by Higgs, supersymmetry, and other theories, a mass scale of greater than one TeV is required. To achieve this mass scale with a hadron-hadron collider, a center-of-mass energy of 6 to 10 times the mass scale is required. With regard to the choice between proton proton collisions and proton-antiproton collisions, though there may be some possible cost advantage in producing pp collisions, it appears that if a high luminosity is required, e.g., 1033 cm-2 sec-1, it is necessary to collide protons against protons because of the difficulty of obtaining a sufficiently intense antiproton source. In order to maximize the energy range available for looking for the unknown, the range should extend well beyond the energy required to provide the 1 TeV mass scale