GENEVA — Scientists at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could help solve remaining enigmas of physics.
The plans for the Future Circular Collider — a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and even below Lake Geneva — published late on Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The study lays out features like the proposed path, environmental impact, scientific ambitions and cost of the project. Independent experts will take a look before CERN’s two-dozen member countries — all European except for Israel — decide in 2028 whether to go forward, starting in the mid-2040s at a cost of some 14 billion Swiss francs (about $16 billion).
CERN officials have touted the promise of scientific discoveries that could drive innovation in areas like cryogenics, superconducting magnets and vacuum technologies that could benefit humankind. Outside experts pointed to the promise of learning more about the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang
“This set of reports represents an important milestone in the process, but a full sense of the likelihood of it being brought to fruition will only be known through careful studies by scientists, engineers and others, including politicians who must make difficult decisions at time when uncertainty rules the day,” said Dave Toback, a professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University, in an e-mail.
The new collider “provides and exciting opportunity for the particle physics community, and indeed all of physics, on the world stage,” said Toback, who was not affiliated with the study, and who worked for years at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in the United States that was shut down in 2011.
For roughly a decade, top minds at CERN have been cooking up plans for a successor to the Large Hadron Collider, a network of magnets that accelerate particles through a 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel and slams them together at velocities approaching the speed of light.
Work at the particle collider confirmed in 2013 the existence of the Higgs boson — the central piece in a puzzle known as the standard model that helps explains some fundamental forces in the universe.
CERN scientists, engineers and partners behind the study considered at least 100 different scenarios for the new collider before coming up with the proposed 91-kilometer circumference at an average depth of 200 meters (656 feet). The tunnel would be about 5 meters (16 feet) in diameter, CERN said.
“Ultimately what we would like to do is a collider which will come up with ten times more energy than what we have today,” said Arnaud Marsollier, a CERN spokesman. “When you have more energy, then you can create particles that are heavier.”
A bigger collider would also offer greater precision to help plumb particularities of the Higgs boson, which “we have kind of a blurry image of” now, he added.
