Author: Davide Castelvecchi / Source: Scientific American
CERN has unveiled its bold dream to build a new accelerator nearly four times as long as its 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider—currently the world’s largest—and up to six times more powerful.
The European particle physics laboratory, outside Geneva, Switzerland, outlined the plan in a technical report on 15 January.
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 colliders ranging in cost from around €9 billion (US$10.2 billion) to €21 billion. It is the lab’s opening bid in a priority-setting process over the next two years, called the European Strategy Update for Particle Physics, and it will affect the field’s future well into the second half of the century.
“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 CERN in the Physics Preparatory Group of the strategy exercise.
After the LHC’s historic discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the collider has not discovered any new particles. This points to a need to push energies as high as possible, Giudice says. “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.”
The potential for a machine such the FCC is “very exciting”, says Halina Abramowicz, a physicist at Tel Aviv University who heads that European strategy process. She adds that the FCC’s potential will be discussed in depth and compared to other proposed projects.
The CERN Council, which includes scientists and government delegates from member countries, will then make the final decision on whether to fund the project.
Too pricey?
Not everyone is convinced the super collider is a good investment. “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 physics at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. “That’s the nightmare that everyone has on their mind but doesn’t want to speak about.”
Hossenfelder says that the large sums involved might be better spent on other types of huge facilities. 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 be safer bets in terms of their return on science.
But Michael Benedikt, a CERN physicist who led the FCC report, says that such a facility would be worth building regardless of the expected scientific outcome. “These kind of largest scale efforts and projects are huge starters for networking, connecting institutes across borders, countries. All these things together make up a very good argument…
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