The discovery of the Higgs boson (and still nothing else) have triggered appearance of many proposals of Higgs factories for precision measurement of the Higgs properties. Among them there are several projects of photon colliders (PC) without e+e- in addition to PLC based on e+e- linear colliders ILC and CLIC. In this paper, following a brief discussion of Higgs factories physics program I give an overview of photon colliders based on linear colliders ILC and CLIC, and of the recently proposed photon-collider Higgs factories with no e+e- collision option based on recirculation linacs in ring tunnels.
Over the past two decades, the high energy physics community has been actively discussing and developing a number of post-LHC collider projects; however, none of them have been approved due to high costs and the uncertainty in post-LHC physics scenarios. There have been great expectations of rich new physics in the 0.1-1 TeV mass region: the Higgs boson (one or several), supersymmetry, or perhaps new particles from the dark-matter family. It has been the general consensus that the best machine for the detailed study of new physics to be discovered at the LHC would be an energy-frontier linear e+e- collider. Physicists held their breath waiting for the results from the LHC. In summer 2012, two LHC detectors, ATLAS and CMS, announced the discovery of a Higgs boson with the mass of 126 GeV and (still) nothing else. The absence of new physics in the region below 1 TeV has changed the post-LHC collider R&D priorities and triggered a zoo of project proposals for the precision study of the 126 GeV Higgs boson, possibly with further upgrades to higher energies. This paper gives an overview of these projects; it is based largely on the reports presented at the first workshop on Higgs factories held at FNAL a few days prior to the present workshop in Protvino.
Photon beams at photon colliders are very narrow, powerful (10--15 MW) and cannot be spread by fast magnets (because photons are neutral). No material can withstand such energy density. For the ILC-based photon collider, we suggest using a 150 m long, pressurized (P ~ 4 atm) argon gas target in front of a water absorber which solves the overheating and mechanical stress problems. The neutron background at the interaction point is estimated and additionally suppressed using a 20 m long hydrogen gas target in front of the argon.
A strong candidate for the Standard Model Scalar boson, H(126), has been discovered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. In order to study this fundamental particle with unprecedented precision, and to perform precision tests of the closure of the Standard Model, we investigate the possibilities offered by An e+e- storage ring collider. We use a design inspired by the B-factories, taking into account the performance achieved at LEP2, and imposing a synchrotron radiation power limit of 100 MW. At the most relevant centre-of-mass energy of 240 GeV, near-constant luminosities of 10^34 cm^{-2}s^{-1} are possible in up to four collision points for a ring of 27km circumference. The achievable luminosity increases with the bending radius, and for 80km circumference, a luminosity of 5 10^34 cm^{-2}s^{-1} in four collision points appears feasible. Beamstrahlung becomes relevant at these high luminosities, leading to a design requirement of large momentum acceptance both in the accelerating system and in the optics. The larger machine could reach the top quark threshold, would yield luminosities per interaction point of 10^36 cm^{-2}s^{-1} at the Z pole (91 GeV) and 2 10^35 cm^{-2}s^{-1} at the W pair production threshold (80 GeV per beam). The energy spread is reduced in the larger ring with respect to what is was at LEP, giving confidence that beam polarization for energy calibration purposes should be available up to the W pair threshold. The capabilities in term of physics performance are outlined.
We studied the feasibility of the measurement of Higgs pair creation at a Photon Linear Collider (PLC). From the sensitivity to the anomalous self-coupling of the Higgs boson, the optimum $gamma gamma$ collision energy was found to be around 270 GeV for a Higgs mass of 120 GeV/$c^2$. We found that large backgrounds such as $gamma gamma rightarrow W^+W^-, ZZ,$ and $bbar{b}bbar{b}$, can be suppressed if correct assignment of tracks to parent partons is achieved and Higgs pair events can be observed with a statistical significance of $sim 5 sigma$ by operating the PLC for 5 years.
Motivated by the recent LHC discovery of the di-photon excess at the invariant mass of ~ 750 GeV, we study the prospect of investigating the scalar resonance at a future photon-photon collider. We show that, if the di-photon excess observed at the LHC is due to a new scalar boson coupled to the standard-model gauge bosons, such a scalar boson can be observed and studied at the photon-photon collider with the center-of-mass energy of ~ 1 TeV in large fraction of parameter space.