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.
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