CERN's New Particle Collider

Preparations for a massive new particle smasher near Geneva are picking up speed. But the European-led project, which hopes to answer some of the biggest questions in physics, faces many obstacles, including competition from China.

In 2012 scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) achieved a key breakthrough when they detected the elusive Higgs boson, an elementary particle that gives mass to all the others. This followed decades of work using accelerators such as the famed Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle collider located north of Geneva.

Yet many fundamental questions about the universe remain unanswered: What constitutes dark matter? Why is our universe filled with matter and not antimatter? Or why do the masses of elementary particles differ so much?

The search for answers to these and other big physics questions requires another “leap to higher energies and intensities”, says CERN. The organisation wants to build a more powerful and precise successor to the LHC, which was conceived in the early 1980s and will complete its mission in 2040.

“We build these machines to explore the nature of the universe. It’s about going out into the unknown and exploring further,” says Mike Lamont, CERN’s director of accelerators and technology.

And so, following requests by the global physics community, plans for the so-called Future Circular Collider (FCC) have been taking shape over the past ten years.  READ MORE...

Giant Particle Accelerator

A radio frequency particle accelerator is displayed in an exhibition during a press tour at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Future Circular Collider (FCC) feasibility study, in Geneva, on April 19, 2023. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP)

GENEVA (AFP) — Europe’s CERN laboratory has taken its first steps toward building a huge new particle accelerator that would eclipse its Large Hadron Collider — and hopes to see light at the end of the tunnel.

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) particle smasher would be more than triple the length of the LHC, already the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, constructed in the hope of revealing secrets about how the universe works.

The FCC would form a new circular tunnel under France and Switzerland, 91 kilometers (56.5 miles) long and about five meters (16 feet) in diameter.


“The goal of the FCC is to push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 tera electron volts, in the search for new physics,” CERN says.

The tunnel would pass under the Geneva region and its namesake lake in Switzerland, and loop around to the south near the picturesque French town of Annecy.

Eight technical and scientific sites would be built on the surface, with seven in France and one in Geneva, CERN engineer Antoine Mayoux told reporters this week.  READ MORE...

From the Dawn of Time

The particle was produced inside the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Physicists at the world's largest atom smasher have detected a mysterious, primordial particle from the dawn of time.

About 100 of the short-lived "X" particles — so named because of their unknown structures — were spotted for the first time amid trillions of other particles inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, located near Geneva at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research).

These X particles, which likely existed in the tiniest fractions of a second after the Big Bang, were detected inside a roiling broth of elementary particles called a quark-gluon plasma, formed in the LHC by smashing together lead ions. By studying the primordial X particles in more detail, scientists hope to build the most accurate picture yet of the origins of the universe. They published their findings Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
wie X particle's internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce."

Scientists trace the origins of X particles to just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, back when the universe was a superheated trillion-degree plasma soup teeming with quarks and gluons — elementary particles that soon cooled and combined into the more stable protons and neutrons we know today.

Just before this rapid cooling, a tiny fraction of the gluons and the quarks collided, sticking together to form very short-lived X particles. The researchers don't know how elementary particles configure themselves to form the X particle's structure. But if the scientists can figure that out, they will have a much better understanding of the types of particles that were abundant during the universe's earliest moments.  READ MORE...