“These kinds of largest scale efforts and projects are huge starters for networking, connecting institutes across borders, countries. Michael Benedikt, a CERN physicist who led the FCC study, says that a supercollider facility would be worth building regardless of the expected scientific outcome. For example, she says that placing a major radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, or a gravitational-wave detector in orbit, would both be safer bets than the collider in terms of their return on science. Hossenfelder says that the large sums involved might be better spent on other types of huge facility. “That’s the nightmare that everyone has on their mind but doesn’t want to speak about.” “There is no reason to think that there should be new physics in the energy regime that such a collider would reach,” says Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. Not everyone is convinced that the supercollider is a good investment. The CERN Council, which includes scientists and government delegates from CERN’s member countries, will then make the final decision on whether to fund the project. She adds that the FCC’s potential will be discussed in depth as part of that exercise and compared with other proposed projects. The potential for a machine such as the FCC is “very exciting”, says Halina Abramowicz, a physicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who heads the European strategy update process. “Today, exploring the highest possible energies with bold projects is our best hope to crack some of the mysteries of nature at the most fundamental level.” This points to a need to push collider energies as high as possible, Giudice says. Since the LHC’s historic discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the collider has not discovered any new particles. “It’s a huge leap, like planning a trip not to Mars, but to Uranus,” says Gian Francesco Giudice, who heads CERN’s theory department and represents the laboratory in the Physics Preparatory Group of the strategy update process. It is the lab’s opening bid in a priority-setting process called the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update, which will take place over the next two years and will affect the field’s future well into the second half of the century. The document offers several preliminary designs for a Future Circular Collider (FCC) - which would be the most powerful particle smasher ever built - with different types of collider ranging in cost from around €9 billion (US$10.2 billion) to €21 billion. Credit: CERNĬERN has unveiled its bold dream of building a new accelerator nearly 4 times as long as its 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - currently the world’s largest collider - and up to 6 times more powerful.ĬERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, outlined the plan in a technical report released on 15 January. Artistic impression of the Future Circular Collider.
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