CERN to Look for New Physics, Dark Matter with New 100km Super Collider

CERN, the international research group responsible for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the discovery of the Higgs boson, has submitted a report that outlines its ambition to build a larger, more powerful collider in the next 20 years.

Dubbed the Future Circular Collider (FCC), the new collider would have a 100km radius (4x as long as the LHC), operate at 100 TeV (roughly 10 times more powerful than the LHC) and cost participating European nations $10B USD.

In the FCC’s four-volume document, plainly titled the Conceptual Design Report (CDR), the committee offers several different accelerator options including electron-positron, proton-proton, and ion-ion collision schemes.

Although the LHC has been producing scientifically significant results, researchers realize that the vastness of the subatomic universe is too great to be completely discovered with current technology. In order to fully understand how a Higgs particle and its associated field interact with other matter, physicists are looking to build a tool that can create a “Higgs factory.” Within that factory, minute deviations in “Standard Model expectations” could be discovered, revealing a host of new physics for future generations to explore.

Furthermore, researchers believe that an even more powerful collider might be able to provide evidence for the origin of dark matter and why matter dominated antimatter at the beginning of the Universe, laying the foundation for material reality.

One can imagine that answering those questions for $10B would be one of the biggest bargains of the century.

With the submission of the FCC’s CDR, physicists will begin making decisions about how the FCC will be constructed. Researchers estimate that an electron-positron collider could be running underneath the European countryside by 2040.