Now that we know the mass of the Higgs boson, which system would be better for the production of Higgs bosons, the LEP ramped up or the LHC?
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2$\begingroup$ Proton-Proton collisions are a mess for tuning to a specific collision energy. A Higgs factory would almost certainly involve lepton collisions. See physics.stackexchange.com/questions/81190/whats-inside-a-proton $\endgroup$– Brandon EnrightCommented Dec 5, 2013 at 19:18
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1$\begingroup$ Related (but not a duplicate): physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20881/…. If you're specifically asking about LEP, it could not easily have been upgraded enough to make Higgs bosons. $\endgroup$– John RennieCommented Dec 5, 2013 at 19:19
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$\begingroup$ They got to about ~110 Gev from memory. Don't desktop accellerators with wakefields get close to that these days;-) $\endgroup$– JitterCommented Dec 5, 2013 at 20:20
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$\begingroup$ I seem to recall that LEP II was bumping up against the limits of both the then-current magnet technology and the Bremsstrahlung energy losses of them beam. A circa 13% energy upgrade in the same tunnel would be surprisingly expensive. I believe most of the community thinks of precision Higgs physics as the main selling point of the ILC. $\endgroup$– dmckee --- ex-moderator kittenCommented Dec 5, 2013 at 23:39
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$\begingroup$ @dmckee t-tbar resonance would be cool too, @ ~350 GeV, to measure mtop and assess vacuum stability. Another good selling point. $\endgroup$– innisfreeCommented Dec 6, 2013 at 10:18
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Now that we know the mass of the Higgs boson, which system would be better for the production of Higgs bosons, the LEP ramped up or the LHC?
LHC was designed as a discovery machine, whereas LEP was designed as a precision machine that would clarify the discoveries of SPS, the previous hadron collider at CERN.
I think it was Feynman who said , I paraphrase, "when you want to see what a watch is made out of you do not throw a watch on another watch and count the wheels, you use a screw driver" comparing the lepton interaction as a screwdriver.
LEP delivered the numbers that established the standard model to accuracies inaccessible to hadron colliders. That is why the next collider planned is the ILC, the International Linear Collider.
LEP in its circular tunnel was working at the limits of the radiation emitted due to the angular acceleration of the electrons and positrons. It had reached a point where a paper for an 114GeV Higgs was proposed based on three events. A machine that will deliver accuracy of interaction parameters needs much higher numbers than this. Linear accelerators lose much less energy and will be more effective and accurate at the same center of mass energy, because energy loss degrades the beams.
