CERN scientists presented on Monday their project to build the Future Circular Collider (FCC) which would be three times larger than the current LHC. It would be buried underground between France and Switzerland.
Faced with international competition, particularly from China, the European scientific community is preparing. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) unveiled its mega project to build a particle accelerator on Monday.
An underground ring 91 kilometers in circumference will be built straddling France and Switzerland in order to unravel the latest mysteries of physics.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC), as it is called, would be three times larger than the current LHC, 27 kilometers long. It too will be buried underground at a depth of 200 meters.
The project could cost 20 billion euros. Work could begin as early as 2033 with the drilling of a tunnel passing under the bed of the Rhône and Lake Geneva.
Then will come the installation of equipment from 2038 and in particular of the two main experiments, with caverns reaching a height of 66 meters to accommodate the particle detectors.
According to its designers, “the FCC will be the most powerful instrument ever built by Humanity to study the laws of Nature at the most fundamental level”, explained Fabiola Gianotti, the Director General of CERN to Swiss television RTS.
A full feasibility study is expected in 2025 but it will probably be necessary to wait until 2028 to obtain a green light from European authorities and partner states. But time is running out: because the Chinese are also in the race to create the first giant accelerator.
This mega project is planned over two phases: the first could end in the 2040s with the commissioning of an “electron-positron collider, light particles, in order to deepen the physics of the Higgs boson and that of the weak interaction.
The second phase is not expected before 2070 with the activation of a proton-proton collider, this time dedicated to heavy particles.
Until then, in addition to completing the financing, it is the whole question of site management that will have to be resolved (what to do with the millions of tons of rubble that will have to be evacuated) and also how to keep such equipment in line with the ecological and energy transition.
