The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a proposed high-luminosity collider that would collide electrons with their antiparticles, positrons, at energies ranging from a few hundred Giga-electronvolts (GeV) to a few Tera-electronvolts (TeV). By covering a large energy range and by ultimately reaching multi-TeV e + e − collisions, scientists at CLIC aim to improve the understanding of nature's fundamental building blocks and to discover new particles or other physics phenomena. CLIC is an international project with institutes worldwide participating in the accelerator, detector and physics studies. First e + e − collisions at CLIC are expected around 2035, following the High-Luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The article presents an up-to-date overview of the CLIC project for a general audience as presented to the 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. * Corresponding author: eva.sicking@cern.ch arXiv:2001.05224v1 [physics.acc-ph] 15 Jan 2020 1 CLIC as the next high-energy collider
CLIC as the next high-energy colliderThe discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 [1,2] was an important milestone in high-energy physics. It completes a puzzle that scientists have been working on for decades: the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics. However it is known that there must be physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM), for example to account for dark matter and the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. In the absence of clear guidance towards the scale of BSM physics from the LHC and other experiments to date, plans are already underway to prepare for the next-generation project in high-energy physics.The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a proposed high-luminosity e + e − collider [3][4][5][6]. It is currently the only mature lepton-collider project aiming for multi-TeV energies. CLIC is an international project hosted by CERN with 75 collaborating institutes involved in the accelerator, detector and physics studies. The advantage of CLIC as the next collider is that it gives access to two complementary search paths for new physics. The first path focuses on studying known SM processes with unprecedented precision, to search for deviations from the predicted behaviour. Such deviations would represent indirect evidence of BSM physics. The second path searches for direct production of new particles. The clean environment of e + e − collisions is favourable, both for the detection of even tiny deviations of the expected SM properties and for the detection of rare new signals [5]. Combined, these results from CLIC would provide important guidance for particle physics.The LHC accelerates and collides protons, composite particles made of quarks and gluons, which each carries a varying fraction of the proton's energy. The complex structure of the proton limits knowledge of the individual quarks or gluons de facto participating in the collisions, complicating interpretation of the data. In addition, proton-proton collisions produce vast rates of backgroun...
