Posted on by Mark Thompson

CERN Wants to Build an Enormous New Atom Smasher: the Future Circular Collider

Future Circular Collider

One of my favourite science and engineering facts is that an underground river was frozen to enable the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be built! On its completion, it helped to complete the proverbial jigsaw of the Standard Model with is last piece, the Higgs Boson. But that’s about as far as it has got with no other exciting leaps forward in uniting gravity and quantum physics. Plans are now afoot to build a new collider that will be three times longer than the LHC and it will be capable of smashing particles together with significantly more energy. 

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Posted on by Evan Gough

CERN is Planning to Build a Much Larger Particle Collider. Much, Much, Larger.

CERN's Future Circular Collider. Image Credit: CERN
CERN's Future Circular Collider. Image Credit: CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, wants to build a particle collider that will dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC has made important discoveries, and planned upgrades to its power ensures it will keep working on physics problems into the future. But eventually, it won’t be enough to unlock the secrets of physics. Eventually, we’ll need something larger and more powerful.

Enter the Future Circular Collider (FCC.) The FCC will exceed the LHC in power by an order of magnitude. On January 15th, the FCC collaboration released its Conceptual Design Report (CDR) that lays out the options for CERN’s Future Circular Collider.

Continue reading “CERN is Planning to Build a Much Larger Particle Collider. Much, Much, Larger.”