The Large Hadron Collider is amazing, wonderful, and one of the most spectacular feats of engineering on the face of the Earth... but it’s not enough. Scientists need to obtain more information, and that translates into a greater amount of energy. The Collider will be busy with experiments for years to come, but the community is already thinking about accelerating the construction of its heir, currently known as the Future Circular Collider. It will be between three and four times larger than the LHC, with seven times its power.
While across the pond science has become a dirty word and the champions of post-truth spread their obscurantism in all directions, more than 500 researchers and scientists gathered in Berlin last week to discuss and chart the roadmap that will lead to the construction of the Future Circular Collider, successor to the current Large Hadron Collider or LHC. Is there anything wrong with the LHC? The answer is no. In fact, it still has an important number of experiments ahead and several scheduled upgrades, but particle physics is a race of energy and precision. The LHC justified every penny with the discovery of the Higgs boson (on which work continues), however, certain aspects remain beyond its reach, starting with dark matter, and the dominance of regular matter over antimatter. In short: more energy is needed.
That is why the FCC has such impressive specifications. We are talking about a “circle” that could measure between 80 and 100 kilometers, three or four times the size of the LHC. On the energy side, the LHC was designed to work at a maximum of 14 teraelectronvolts (TeV), but the FCC has its sights set on 100 TeV, seven times more. Such levels could give rise to a whole new series of scientific discoveries, not bad considering that we are blind to 95 percent of the Universe.
Needless to say, the development of the FCC will take a long time. By comparison, the construction phase of the LHC alone took ten years (30 in total), and as we have already observed, its pauses for upgrades last months. The LHC is expected to run smoothly until 2035, so the FCC must begin its first steps now to be ready when the scientific community needs it most.
