Date Time A New Era of Accelerator Science Even before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland detected the elusive subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson in 2012, scientists around the world were already hard at work planning for the next particle accelerator. Arguably some of the most sophisticated scientific machines on the planet, these engineering marvels take decades to plan, build, test, and start. Such is the case for the proposed International Linear Collider, or ILC. “To fully understand the Higgs particle’s role in nature and go beyond our current theories, we need even more sensitivity and precision, and that’s what the ILC and its experiments are designed to do,” said Jan Strube, a physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). His research pairs advanced computing with high energy physics to optimize the detection capabilities of current and future experiments.