Implementing a linear collider facility at CERN

I live in the area designated for the ILC (International Linear Collider) in Japan, but there has been no progress at all. The stakeholders are desperately trying to promote its benefits, but there is absolutely no understanding among the general public. The Japanese government is also not supportive at all. The country simply isn’t in a financial position to cover the several hundred billion yen needed for construction, and with rapid aging and a declining birthrate, there’s no prospect of the fiscal situation improving. Unfortunately, whether a new experimental facility can be built is more of a political issue than a scientific one, and the outlook is bleak.

The "cold copper" accelerator technology is really neat, in my opinion. The way particle accelerators work is that they pump RF through waveguides into cavities, such that the electric field pushes on the electrons right as they enter the cavity. Historically, they've been built with geometry like cylinders and rectangles where the fields can be worked out analytically, and that can be fabricated easily. They're proposing using modern computational modeling techniques to design better cavity geometries that can then be fabricated with modern CNC techniques. That should allow more efficient accelerators and higher acceleration gradients.