GENEVA (AN) — CERN's next big move to explain how the universe came to be calls for an even bigger atom smasher: the Future Circular Collider.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, said on late Monday that after several years of intense work it has finished plans for a new particle collider with a 91-kilometer circumference – more than triple the existing 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider – at an average depth of 200 meters below the Swiss-French border.
More than 1,000 physicists and engineers worldwide were involved in creating the proposal, which involved consideration of at least 100 different scenarios for creating another underground collider that can produce higher-energy collisions of particles to investigate puzzles such as dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe.
The LHC has detectors that record the collisions between protons sent in opposite directions around its ring in a vast complex along the border near Geneva. Now, scientists want to keep following up on their groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and other outstanding questions in fundamental physics.
Plans for the FCC call for two possible stages: an electron–positron collider serving as a Higgs, electroweak and top-quark factory running at different center-of-mass energies, followed at a later stage by a proton–proton collider operating at an unprecedented collision energy of around 100 TeV, CERN announced.
The estimated cost of 15 billion Swiss francs ($17 billion) over 12 years, starting from the early 2030s, would cover civil engineering, technical infrastructure, electron and positron accelerators, and four detectors for operation. CERN said most of those costs would come from its annual budget.
The governing CERN Council, with delegates from 24 member nations, is slated to examine the proposal in November and made a decision about whether or not to proceed around 2028. Independent experts also will go over it. If it is built, the FCC would start being used for experiments in the 2040s, then go to a second phase of operations in the 2070s.
