British physicist to head up international super-collider effort

Lyn Evans will oversee merger of two collider programmes to work alongside LHC

Prominent British physicist Lyn Evans has been named as the head for a planned international particle accelerator effort.

The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) said that the Cern scientist would be named the director for the development of a yet-unnamed linear collider project.

The ICFA said that Evans, who will remain based at Cern, will oversee the merger of the International Linear Colidier and Compact Linear Collider projects into a single effort and develop the linear collider.

Once completed, the ICFA believes that the linear collider project will be able to work in tandem with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to study particle physics and seek out matter which could prove theories on the origins of the universe.

"The international particle physics community is fortunate to have Lyn at the helm of this new organisation," said Pier Oddone, chair of ICFA chair and director at Fermilab.

"He brings tremendous experience to the position, having led the construction of the Large Hadron Collider that is already exceeding performance expectations after only a short time in operation."

Evans is currently working with Cern as the project leader for the LHC. The collider is currently in the final stages of research before a planned shutdown until 2014.

As beneficial as the collider projects have been for the world of science, they have proved to be a daunting challenge to the IT industry. The massive LHC facility generates an estimated one petabyte of data every second, and technical faults in a single component can put entire experiments at risk.

The project has had unintended benefits for the industry as well. The massive compute and analytical requirements of the LHC and other colliders have helped firms develop products for large-scale business analytics tools.