Yeah, no. Only LHC can generate particle events in a highly controllable environment with enough energy. In physics there are energy thresholds. Below a certain level of energy a certain event just never happens.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.
But isn't that also exactly why the whole effort is a bit futile? If it takes this much effort to detect that an event is even happening, you end up describing something that only really happens in a lab situation and has not much relevance for the real world.
That said, LHC cost $4.75 billion that's pretty much nothing compared to the amount of money that gets thrown around in the tech world. So might still be worth it just for the fun of it, even if the discoveries don't have any direct application.
From a purely isolated Experimental (Physics) point of view this might be true. But of course both theory and experiments are highly intertwined. For instance if you would like to observe Neutrinoless Double beta decay in nature, even if it exists, you might never get a chance to actually measure it because it would occur so seldomly. With setups like the LHC there is actually a realistic chance (if such phenomena exist) to measure them and thus applying that knowledge to various theories existing or in the making.
That said, of course particle physics results have direct applications. For instance in speculative commercial applications of Nuclear fusion and also Quantum Computing is connected to particle physics. I mean even GPS systems are based on 4D space time. Not entirely sure if any of that can be directly attributed to research happening in colliders but this is just one part of the field, mainly the experimental part - which can verify/falsify theories or result in new ones.
We need to figure out what we are missing, namely what is dark-matter, how does it interact with the currently visible matter, are there extra dimensions and so on. Once that it is figured out it might well be that we could engineer systems beyond our wildest dreams, we just don’t know yet.
Does this sort of thing give us tangible benefits? Is it worth the investment? I get things like materials science, supercomputers, AI research, etc. But these colliders are so expensive, all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using, AFAIK. But I know nothing, am I wrong here?
The LHC has been in operation for about 12-14 years, and has been a "thing" from planning onwards for almost 40. It's cost $9B, split between a huge list of countries.
Estimates of waste in the US medical system range from around $500B-$2T annualy. The lower end of that scale would support starting a new, fully funded, project of a similar scale for every state in the US every single year.
At a multi-national, multi-decade scale I just don't think it's actually that much money.
> all for the sake of discovering a tiny subatomic particle that we have no way of using
There are few ways I'd look at this.
One is that fundamental science can bleed into regular use over time, look at lasers. IIRC they had no clear use when invented, but are now absolutely key to so much. While the LHC had a headline goal (at least publicly) it's not just discovering one thing, it's a large tool to test fundamental physics.
Another is that this money and work doesn't go nowhere. People are paid to work on big complex problems, building and designing magnets, detectors, computing systems, software for analysis, etc. A lot of that is not going to be entirely custom, and at the very least supports companies & the supply chain for newer advanced technology. NASA I think occasionally puts out some lists of things that derived from their work.
Beyond that, I think there's value in getting a lot of people in a lot of countries to work together on a broadly non-political goal.
the collider itself lends itself to few directly tangible benefits, however the construction of the collider and analysis of the data is one of the largest innovation engines in the science world.
a prolific amount of software, engineering, and material science has come from CERN, as well spinning off numerous high-tech startups.
The low hanging fruit of discovering new physics looks like this. Build a bigger machine to collide particles with even more energy. Observe what comes out. It's a clear direction. Just throw money at the problem and get a result.