> I can't speak to whether it would cost less to do these experiments in space, I'm no expert on the colliding of particles and the implications thereof.
I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these things work.
There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector component. I believe but I am not sure that a key advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged particles turn they lose energy by emitting electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it so very large in the first place, instead of just trying to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
So what do you intend to do in space?
The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime). But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need to do all your acceleration all at once, at the accelerators, which immediately negates any possible advantages you could possibly have from space.
Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets). You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will have to be done in orbit, and then when it's running you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this than about the Mars colony.
I'm a nonexpert who has some vague idea of how these things work.
There's two kinds of accelerator: circular and linear. In either case, you have a tube, often underground, a bunch of accelerator components along the tube, and a detector component. I believe but I am not sure that a key advantage of the circular one is that you can accelerate the particles in the beam as they take multiple loops around the tube. The disadvantage is that when charged particles turn they lose energy by emitting electromagnetic radiation, and the whole point of the accelerator is to stuff these particles full of energy to make interesting collisions. This is mitigated by having higher-radius accelerators, which is the key reason we build things like the Large Hadron Collider and make it so very large in the first place, instead of just trying to add stronger stuff at existing accelerators.
So what do you intend to do in space?
The quasi-achievable near term might see a linear accelerator that consists of two components orbiting and firing particle beams into a third (the detector) because we are obviously not orbiting the mass of the LHC in the near term, and we're not orbiting anything that's rigid and also substantially larger than a rocket payload. It will no doubt be tricky to align the beams, as the orbits are ellipses and the beams need to be approximately straight lines (or close enough, blah blah spacetime). But the fundamental problem is that you're going to need to do all your acceleration all at once, at the accelerators, which immediately negates any possible advantages you could possibly have from space.
Perhaps you could do something very clever with an orbit-sized circular accelerator with accelerators spaced at intervals around the planet. You'd need a lot of launches of some intense equipment (I believe the Earth-based accelerator components are giant supercooled magnets). You'd also need an energy source, lots of engineering prowess to get everything in good working order (LHC bringup was very hands-on) except any adjustments will have to be done in orbit, and then when it's running you'd face the problem of LOLmaintenance.
I'm going to be honest, I'm more skeptical about this than about the Mars colony.