Planning is in full swing for the successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
The new “atom smasher,” called the Future Circular Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will smash particles with so much energy that scientists say it can investigate the most mysterious entities of our universe: dark energy and dark matter.
LHC operators at CERN released the “interim evaluation” results of the FCC Feasibility Study to the press on Monday, February 5. The feasibility study started in 2021 and is planned to be concluded in 2025. The findings so far constitute a three-year study in which scientists and engineers from around the world determined the layout of the new accelerator ring, the implementation of the FCC facility, and the concepts of the new accelerators. detectors and financing aspects.
The FCC will operate under the jurisdiction of France and Switzerland, just as the LHC does now, but the future accelerator will stretch 56.5 miles (90.7 kilometers), making it three times larger than CERN’s current particle accelerator, which is 16.8 miles (16.8 miles) wide. It will make it more than twice as long (27 kilometers) long. The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
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The FCC will operate in the same way as the LHC, using superconducting magnets to accelerate charged particles around a loop and then smash them together as they approach the speed of light.
Scientists can study fundamental physics by observing showers of secondary particles created when particles such as protons collide with each other. However, while the LHC can reach energy of about 13 tera electronvolts (TeV) when operating at full power, CERN says that the FCC should be able to reach energies as great as 100 TeV.
“Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and at the highest energy,” CERN director general Fabiola Gianotti said at the interim report presentation in Geneva on Tuesday, February 6. said.
Why do particle accelerators need more power?
The LHC’s greatest achievement so far is undoubtedly the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the force-carrying particle of a field called the Higgs Field that permeates the universe and determines the masses of most other particles.
The groundbreaking observation of the Higgs Boson by two LHC detectors was announced on July 4, 2012, and is credited with completing the Standard Model of particle physics, humanity’s best explanation of the universe, its particles, and their interactions at the subatomic scale.
But the Standard Model still needs some fine-tuning, and since 2012 scientists have been using the LHC to probe physics beyond the model to make these adjustments. Success was limited. This search will accelerate once the LHC’s high-luminosity upgrade is completed, meaning the particle accelerator will be able to perform more collisions and offer scientists more opportunities to detect exotic physics.
The two main outliers of the Standard Model (in other words, why some of these tweaks are necessary) are dark matter and dark energy.
This phenomenon, sometimes collectively known as the “dark universe,” poses such great mysteries to scientists that dark energy makes up about 68% of the energy and matter in the universe, while dark matter makes up about 27% of these continents. But neither can be seen because they don’t interact with light, and no one has been able to detect them with other direct detection methods either. This means that the matter and energy that we understand and can explain make up no more than 5% of the content of the universe, and that we have very little idea what approximately 95% of the universe actually is.
And probing these aspects of the universe may require smashing particles with far more energy than the high-luminosity LHC can do.
First of all, dark matter cannot be “standard matter” like the atoms that make up the things we see around us every day, such as the stars, planets, and our bodies. Remember how it doesn’t interact with light? Protons, neutrons, and electrons, collectively known as “baryons,” do this. So dark matter must be something else.
Currently, the only way scientists can infer the existence of dark matter is through its interaction with gravity and its effect on baryonic matter and thus light.
Dark energy is even more problematic. This is what scientists think is the force driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
This relates to a period of expansion separate from the initial inflation of the universe triggered by the Big Bang. After this early expansion nearly came to a halt, at a later period the universe inexplicably began to expand again. This rate of expansion is actually accelerating today, and dark energy is used to explain this action.
However, as we mentioned before, scientists do not actually know what dark energy is.
To understand why this is disturbing, imagine you are swinging a child on a swing. The Big Bang is like your first and only push that sets the oscillation into motion. Even if you do not intervene, the oscillation may continue for a short time, then it will halve. Then imagine that even though you are standing there, it suddenly starts moving again. And not only that, it swings faster and faster, reaching higher points. This is similar to what dark energy does to the fabric of space.
CERN hopes that the FCC’s high-energy collisions can reveal the nature of this ongoing late-universe thrust and the particles that make up dark matter.
But it will be some time before this future particle accelerator is ready to investigate the dark universe.
Timeline and cost of the Circular Collider of the Future
In 2028, three years after the FCC feasibility study is completed, CERN member states will meet to decide whether the FCC will seek approval. CERN says that if the future collider is given the green light, construction would begin in the mid-2030s.
FCC will be completed in phases. The first stage is an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) that will smash together negatively charged electrons, their positive antiparticle counterparts known as positrons, and other light particles. CERN adds that FCC-ee should be operational by 2045.
FCC’s second machine will be a proton colliding accelerator (FCC-hh), sitting alongside FCC-ee in the same evacuated tunnel buried beneath the French-Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva. According to CERN, this part will come online in 2070 at the latest.
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At the CERN press conference, Gianotti explained some of the costs of the FCC, saying that the first FCC-ee phase alone would cost an estimated $17 billion.
CERN’s director general justified the cost by adding that the FCC was the only machine that would allow humanity to make the huge leap forward in studying matter needed to unlock the secrets of the dark universe.