On the Swiss–French border, at the headquarters of the European laboratory CERN, a battle is under way for the future of particle physics. CERN’s leaders want to build the biggest machine on the planet here: an enormous particle accelerator that would open in 2070 and would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the lab’s current flagship facility.
Everything about the plan is unprecedented. The Future Circular Collider (FCC), as it’s called, would sit in a tunnel 91 kilometres in circumference, more than three times the size of the LHC’s. Its cost is likely to be at least US$30 billion and it would smash protons together at energies eight times greater than those in the LHC. It is hoped that expanding this energy frontier will reveal never-before-seen particles that could solve some pressing issues regarding the standard model — the current best theory of the Universe’s fundamental particles and fields — and shed light on some of physics’ greatest mysteries, such as the nature of dark matter.
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