The new particle accelerator will have a circumference of 100 kilometers and will be four times larger and six times more powerful than the current LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Its total cost, 21,000 million euros.
Called FCC (Future Circle Collider), this new “God machine” will allow scientists to study the Higgs boson in greater detail, as well as obtain new data on dark matter.
“It was a historic day for particle physics around the world,” said Fabiola Giannotti, director of the CERN council that recently gave the project the green light.
The FCC will intersect with the LHC, expanding under Switzerland and France. But before construction begins, a geological survey will be carried out in Geneva and the proposed route of the tunnels, especially to rule out the possibility of underground rivers forcing deviation from the original plan.
Not only will the new machine be bigger, but it will also be equipped with twice as strong magnets that will allow for more powerful collisions.
This massive project does not have universal and unanimous approval by the scientific community, with some saying that it is a “waste of money” and that it “could be spent on other things,” for example, on a radio telescope on the Moon or a gravitational wave detector in space, or in funding other research projects.
However, despite approval by CERN, the construction of the new collider still needs to secure funds from members of the European Union, the United Kingdom and other agencies. And, to obtain it, it would only be ready in 2040, since its underground construction will take a decade, the same period of time that it will take to develop some of the technologies that do not yet exist as such for the collision of particles at the proposed levels.
The science produced at the FCC will take particle physics into uncharted territory for humanity.
The decision of the 22 members of the European Union is expected to be made in the coming years, debuting with the launch of an electron-positron collider with an estimated cost of € 8.1 billion. The second phase will then include a proton superconducting machine in the same tunnel, bringing the total cost to € 21 billion.
While the first machine will be started in the 2040s, the second will start to collide particles sometime in the 2050s.
“The ultimate goal of the FCC is to provide a superconducting proton accelerator ring, with an energy of up to 100 TeV (tera-electrovoltages), that is, an order of magnitude more powerful than that of the LHC,” explained Frédérick Bordry of CERN. “Expanding our understanding of the physical laws of nature requires pushing the energy frontier much further, something we hope to achieve this century.”
Source: Daily Mail
