Europe's CERN laboratory has taken its first steps towards building a huge new particle accelerator that would eclipse its Large Hadron Collider—and hopes to see light at the end of the tunnel.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) particle smasher would be more than triple the length of the LHC, already the world's largest and most powerful particle collider, constructed in the hope of revealing secrets about how the universe works.
The FCC would form a new circular tunnel under France and Switzerland, 91 kilometres (56.5 miles) long and about five metres (16 feet) in diameter.
"The goal of the FCC is to push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 tera electron volts, in the search for new physics," CERN says.
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