CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

Summary

Released today, a report of a study investigating the project’s feasibility will serve as input for the European Strategy for Particle Physics and be assessed by the CERN Council in the coming months After several years of intense work, CERN and international partners have completed a study to assess the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider (FCC). Reflecting the expertise of over a thousand physicists and engineers across the globe, the report presents an overview of the different aspects related to the potential implementation of such a project. The FCC is a proposed particle collider with a circumference of about 91 km that could succeed CERN’s current flagship instrument – the 27-km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – in the 2040s. Its scientific motivation stems from the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, along with other crucial outstanding questions in fundamental physics. The Higgs boson is the simplest yet most perplexing particle discovered so far, with properties that have far-reaching implications for our existence. It is related to the mechanism that enabled elementary particles such as electrons to gain mass a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang, allowing atoms and thus structures to form. It may also be connected to the fate of the Universe and could potentially shed light on the many unsolved mysteries of modern physics. As described in Feasibility Study Report, the FCC research programme outlines two possible stages: an electron–positron collider serving as a Higgs, electroweak and top-quark factory running at different centre-of-mass energies, followed at a later stage by a proton–proton collider operating at an unprecedented collision energy of around 100 TeV. The complementary physics programmes of each stage match the highest priorities set out in the 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The report covers wide-ranging aspects related to the potential implementation of such a project. These include physics ...