Why is it important?
Particle accelerators and colliders are needed to enable progress in our understanding of physics. Colliders like LHC are already using huge amounts of low temperature superconductors (for magnets) and high temperature superconductors (for current leads and current buses). The main direction of further development is the increase of particle collision energy, while the energy demand of the facility should be reduced as much as possible to reduce cost and carbon footprint. Both these problems are solved by using high-field magnets enabled by high temperature superconductors. Some national and regional strategies foresee wider use of HTS for accelerator magnets for physics.
What's holding us back?
The decision-making process for large international scientific projects includes many stakeholders and is intrinsically very long. As for next generation particle collider, there’s an ongoing discussion and some initial progress has already been made. However, even one collider project similar to LHC is capable of creating considerable demand for HTS conductor for multiple years or even decades.