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...
