The European Organization for Nuclear Research is starting new work under the programme “Future Circular Collider”. The programme is on the list of topics to be discussed at a conference at the University of Geneva in 2014.
Such a machine is forecast to reach extreme energies of up to 100 TeV and to succeed the Large Hadron Collider in the study of elementary particle physics.
Although CERN's main project, the Large Hadron Collider, is at present only in the early stages of its research, preliminary work on the new machine has already begun.
As is well known, the tasks of the LHC were not limited to the study of the Higgs boson; the collider's programme is laid out decades ahead. CERN is working towards a large-scale upgrade of the collider, which after 2025 will raise the number of particle collisions tenfold and substantially increase the efficiency of its operation.
Even so, in present-day elementary particle and high-energy physics the invention of new technology is a long process. The Large Hadron Collider, for instance, was designed back in the 1980s and needed another 25 years before it began work in 2008. The centre's scientists believe the time has come to think about future projects. Frédérick Bordry, CERN's Director for Accelerators, says that now is the time to sow the seeds of future technology and to be ready to take decisions in a few years' time.
The aim of the new programme, called “Future Circular Collider” (FCC), is to develop new colliders, with the emphasis on a circular hadron collider similar to the LHC. Preliminary figures give its tunnel a length of 80-100 km and the energy reached inside it up to 100 TeV (1014 electronvolts). It is worth recalling that the energy of the colliding protons in the LHC is about 14 TeV and its circumference about 27 km.
The programme “Future Circular Collider” will overlap with the project “Compact Linear Collider”. That project is studying a linear collider based on a new accelerator technology, and work on it has been going on for ten years already. The no less large project “International Linear Collider” has also existed for many years. So an analysis of the options and a costing of the FCC may lead in 2018 to a revision and renewal of the European strategy for elementary particle physics and to the choice of the most preferable project.
The grand research effort of the FCC programme will begin with the international conference Future Circular Collider Study kick-off Meeting in Geneva in 2014.