Experts and policymakers will be evaluating options, and are due to announce their findings in 2020. These do not require acceleration to the most extreme energies, but are likely to produce many key results.ĬERN’s proposal is its opening bid in a priority-setting process for European particle physics. Its flagship Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, has shifted focus to neutrino experiments. After the United States shut down the Tevatron accelerator in 2011, it moved on from building such machines. Yet the push to higher energies is not the only way to pursue an ambitious programme. Consequently, the main argument for building such a machine rests on exploration. This has lent support to the idea that there are no new ones to be found, even in a larger collider. After the Higgs, theorists expected that the LHC would open up a world of more-massive particles, the study of which would require a new machine. Its main triumph was the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Some physicists think that the science case for building a bigger collider has become weaker since the LHC began operations. It is essential that researchers and others debate this - and are seen to do so - in good faith and with respect for a diversity of opinions. It should go without saying that any decision on whether to fund a scientific project must weigh the costs and benefits, and whether it represents a missed opportunity to fund something else. Next-generation LHC: CERN lays out plans for €21-billion supercollider A few took to blogs and social media to launch personal attacks against their critics. In return, some in the particle-physics community acted as if such scepticism were a betrayal of science. But not everyone in the research world has embraced it, with some baulking at the proposed cost. The entire programme could end up costing €30 billion in construction costs alone.ĬERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, certainly has the credibility to pull off such an ambitious programme. This would host the next big collider, smashing electrons and positrons, as well as a more powerful version of the existing Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Over the next two decades, they want to build a €5-billion (US$5.7-billion), 100-kilometre-long, circular tunnel - about the length of the Washington DC Beltway. Last week, officials at CERN outlined their vision of the European physics facility’s future. Credit: Maximilien Brice, Julien Ordan/CERN The good news is that the particles aren’t going anywhere, and whenever CERN can generate the funds to begin tackling the project in earnest, it could unlock some tantalizing secrets about the nature of physics and the fabric of our reality.Particle physicists must engage with critics of plans for an expensive new collider. I just think there is not enough scientific potential in doing that kind of study right now.” “I still think it’s not a good idea,” Hossenfelder says. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, has emerged as a critic of pursuing ever higher energies when the scientific payback - apart from measuring the properties of known particles - is far from guaranteed. The costly plan has detractors - even in the physics community. That second phase wouldn’t take place until much closer to the year 2100.Īs Nature reports, the project might just be a little too ambitious, at least for right now. The first stage will include the construction of a super-collider that can generate large numbers of Higgs bosons for study, while the second stage would see the complete dismantling of the first stage and then the building of a higher-powered super-collider in its place. As with the Large Hadron Collider, CERN is planning on the FCC being constructed in two stages. Things like design and location will eventually need to be sorted out, but none of that can really be considered until CERN knows there’s enough cash on hand to make it all happen. There’s a lot standing between CERN and the Future Circular Collider, but there’s one factor that will be more important than anything: money. The Future Circular Collider, on the other hand, will cost an estimated $23 billion to construct, and as it’s roughly four times as large as the LHC, there’s no telling how long it might take to build, especially when factoring in possible delays and setbacks.
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