International collaboration publishes design for an even larger hadron collider at CERN

16 Jan 2019 11:31 AM

An international collaboration of scientists and engineers, including many from the UK, have submitted its Conceptual Design Report (CDR) for the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

The report outlines possible large circular colliders of the future and showcases the physics opportunities offered by machines of unprecedented energy and intensity, perhaps as much as ten times as powerful as the current Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Over the next two years, the particle physics community will be updating the European Strategy for Particle Physics, outlining the future of the discipline beyond the horizon of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The possibility of a future circular collider will be examined during the strategy process, together with the other post-LHC collider option at CERN, the CLIC linear collider.

Dr Rob Appleby, from Manchester University/Cockcroft Institute, is the HL-LHC-UK spokesperson and said of the proposed FCC “This Future Circular Collider, if built, will help us further understand the building blocks of our universe, and the UK has played its part in the conceptual design of these great machines”.

Using new-generation high-field superconducting magnets, the FCC proton collider would offer a wide range of new physics opportunities. Reaching energies of 100 TeV and beyond would allow precise studies of how a Higgs particle interacts with another Higgs particle, and thorough exploration of the role of the electroweak symmetry breaking in the history of our universe.

You can read more about this project on the CERN website.

CERN homepage

STFC and CERN

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation, co-ordinates and manages the UK’s involvement and subscription with CERN. The UK’s influence on both CERN Council and CERN Finance Committee is co-ordinated through the UK Committee on CERN (UKCC).

UK membership of CERN gives our physicists and engineers access to the experiments and allows UK industry to bid for contracts, UK nationals to compete for jobs and research positions at CERN, and UK schools and teachers to visit. UK scientists hold many key roles at CERN. Firms in the UK win contracts for work at CERN worth millions of pounds each year. The impact of winning contracts is often even greater as it enables companies to win business elsewhere.