CERN Plans New Particle Collider 30 Times More Powerful Than LHC

by Ryan Whitwam

The Large Hadron Collider is the most advanced and complex machine ever built by humanity, and it’s allowed us to study the inner workings of the universe in unprecedented ways. However, there’s only so much you can do with a 27-kilometer particle collider. So, CERN has approved plans to build a much larger collider called the Future Circular Collider (FCC) with a 100-kilometer (62-mile) circumference.

Physicists have made many predictions about the nature of the universe and the existence of exotic particles. The best way we know to expose these particles to test theories is to smash protons together at high speeds and see what comes out. That’s how the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson in 2012. Generally, higher collider power means more particle detections. The LHC produced the Higgs results with 13 125–126 GeV of energy, but the instrument can run at 13 TeV (an order of magnitude more). An ongoing upgrade will push the LHC even further, but the FCC will dwarf this instrument with a predicted collision energy of 100 TeV.

When the FCC is up and running, it will be able to spit out Higgs bosons on demand, allowing scientists to map the way these particles interact with other matter. The first iteration of the FCC will rely on…