The Large Hadron Collider still has experiments scheduled into 2040, but CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—already has plans to iterate on the LHC and making something much bigger: the Future Circular Collider.
And bigger might be an understatement.
The proposed $21.5 billion Future Circular Collider (FCC) would “push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 TeV, in the search for new physics,” CERN wrote. Expected to have a 56-mile circumference, compared to the 16.5 of the LHC, it would be able to handle energy levels about seven times those of the LHC.
“The FCC will not only be a wonderful instrument to improve our understanding of fundamental laws of physics and of nature,” CERN director general Fabiola Gianotti said during a briefing, according to the Financial Times, “it will also be a driver of innovation.” Much like the LHC before it.
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