The February 2008 issue of Scientific American, now out on the newsstands, features a special series (with top billing on the cover) entitled "The Future of Physics." The series, consisting of three primary articles that together run for about 20 pages, focuses on the upcoming particle/high energy experiments that will take place at the Large Hadron Collider in the next year or so, and beyond. (I, myself, wrote an eight-part series on the LHC for this blog last year, spanning from the opening essay in May to the concluding piece in September; earlier postings can be accessed via the archives to this blog.)
The first article of the new Scientific American series ("The Discovery Machine") focuses on the engineering aspects of physically constructing the LHC. Two areas I found of interest were the detailed description of the detector systems and how they are designed to winnow down the incredible avalanche of data to the occurrences of greatest potential importance to scientists; and a summary of the malfunctions that have occurred in testing the LHC and have caused delays in the official opening of the facility.
The second article ("The Coming Revolutions in Particle Physics") focuses on the scientific aspects of what physicists expect (or at least hope) to find at the LHC. One historical development discussed in the article, which I don't recall ever learning about before, is how some of the key ideas of electroweak symmetry breaking (i.e., how the electromagnetic and weak forces diverged after being unified) were inspired by superconductivity research. This article is accompanied by nice colorful charts providing overviews of the Standard Model of particle physics, the "hierarchy problem," and "Five Goals for the LHC."
Finally, the third article ("Building the Next-Generation Collider") discusses the proposed successor to the LHC, the International Linear Collider (a website set up to provide basic information on the proposed ILC is available here). This article focuses both on the engineering of building the ILC and how it would complement the LHC scientifically.
The ILC is just a hypothetical entity at this point. What country it would be built in, and how its estimated cost of many billion dollars would be funded, remain to be seen. Also, the richness of scientific yield from the LHC (or relative lack thereof) may affect the prospects for the ILC. In any case, the article estimates that research at the ILC -- if it ever gets underway -- would not take place until sometime in the decade of the 2020's.