Author: MIKE MCRAE / Source: ScienceAlert
Some of the Universe’s deepest secrets are locked up so tight, a whole new kind of subatomic cataclysm is needed to tear them free.
To unleash those kinds of forces, European physicists want to build a particle accelerator to rival anything we’ve seen, one that will make the famous 27 kilometre (16.
7 mile) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) look like a high school science experiment.Officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have just presented the results of a study that informs the design and construction of technology expected to open the next chapter on particle physics.
Their plan begins with a 100 kilometre (62 mile) circular collider, costing in the ballpark of €9 billion (US$10 billion).
For the time being it’s quite simply referred to as the Future Circular Collider, or FCC. Once it actually starts hunting for new physics sometime in the next few decades, it might have a different name.
But either way, this next generation accelerator should help us crack matter like never before.
CERN’s current king of colliders, the LHC, is one of a complex of particle accelerators on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.
Its loop of superconducting magnets nudges opposing streams of protons towards 0.999999990 light speed, supplying each with 6.5 teraelectronvolts of energy – enough to condense a variety of particles out of the carnage of their impacts.
The most famous of these was the Higgs boson, a particle first predicted in the 1960s as responsible for missing mass, and finally experimentally confirmed in 2012.
Its discovery completed the set of predicted objects that make up the fundamental building blocks…
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