CERN has revealed plans for the Future Circular Collider, which will dwarf the Large Hadron Collider in size and power and hunt for the missing 95% of our universe.
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A illustration shows how the Future Circular Collider will
dwarf the Large Hadron Collider (Image credit: CERN) |
Planning is well underway for the successor to the world's
most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The new "atom smasher," named the Future Circular
Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will smash particles
together with so much energy, in fact, that scientists say it may be capable of
investigating our universe's most mysterious entities: Dark energy and dark
matter.
LHC operators at CERN revealed the results of a
"midterm review" of their FCC Feasibility Study to the press on
Monday (Feb. 5). The feasibility study began in 2021 and is set to conclude in
2025. The findings thus far constitute three years of work, with scientists and
engineers from across the globe determining the placement of the new
accelerator's ring, the implementation of the FCC facility, concepts for
detectors and funding aspects.
The FCC will run under the jurisdiction of France and
Switzerland, just like the LHC currently does, but the future accelerator will
stretch 56.5 miles (90.7 kilometers), making it over three times the length of
CERN's current particle accelerator, which is 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) long.
The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
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A small stretch of the near 17-mile-long LHC particle
accelerator which will be dwarfed by the FCC. (Image credit: Robert Lea) |
The FCC will operate in the same way as the LHC,
accelerating charged particles around a loop, using superconducting magnets,
then smashing them together as they
approach the speed of light.
Scientists can probe fundamental physics by observing
showers of secondary particles created when particles like protons slam
together. But whereas the LHC can attain energies of around 13 terra
electronvolts (TeV) when operating at full power, CERN says 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 highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti
said at the interim report presentation in Geneva on Tuesday (Feb 6.)
Why do particle accelerators need more power?
The crowning achievement of the LHC thus far is undoubtedly
the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the force-carrying particle of a field called
the Higgs Field, which permeates the universe and dictates most other
particles' masses.
The breakthrough sighting 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, which is humanity's best description of the
universe, its particles and their interactions on a subatomic scale.
Yet, the Standard Model still requires some tweaking — and,
since 2012, scientists have been using the LHC to search for physics beyond the
model to make those adjustments. Success has been limited. This search will get
a boost when the LHC's high luminosity upgrade is completed, which will mean
the particle accelerator can perform more collisions and offer scientists more
opportunities to spot exotic physics.
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A Higgs boson decays recorded in a particle collision
recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC on May 18, 2012. (Image credit:
ATLAS) |
The two main outliers of the Standard Model (aka, why some
of those tweaks are necessary) are dark matter and dark energy.
Sometimes collectively known as the "dark
universe," these phenomena constitute such large mysteries for scientists
because dark energy accounts for around 68% of the universe's energy and
matter, while dark matter accounts for around 27% of these continents. But
neither can be seen because they don't interact with light, and no one has been
able to pin them down through other forms of direct detection, either. That
means that the matter and energy we understand and can account for comprise no
more than 5% of the universe's contents, and we have little idea what around
95% of the universe actually is.
And probing these aspects of the universe may require
smashing particles together with much more energy than the high-luminosity LHC
is capable of.
To begin with, dark matter can't be "standard
matter" like the atoms that make up the stuff we see around us on an
everyday basis, like stars, planets and our bodies. Remember how it doesn't
interact with light? Well, protons, neutrons and electrons — collectively known
as "baryons" — do. So, dark matter must be something else.
Currently, the only way scientists can infer the presence of
dark matter is via its interaction with gravity and the effect this has on
baryonic matter and, in turn, light.
Dark energy is even more problematic. It's the force that
scientists see driving the acceleration of the universe's expansion.
It concerns a period of expansion separate from the
universe's initial inflation, which was triggered by the Big Bang. After that
early expansion slowed to a near halt, in a later epoch, the universe
unexplainably started to expand again. This expansion rate is actually speeding
up to this day, with dark energy used to account for that action.
Yet, as we've discussed, scientists don't actually know what
dark energy is.
To see why that is troubling, imagine pushing a child on a
swing. The Big Bang is akin to your first and only push that gets the swing in
motion. The swing may keep going for a short while, even without any action
from you, then it will come to a half. Then, imagine that it suddenly begins
motion again despite you just standing there. And not only that, but it swings
faster and faster, reaching higher and higher points. This is similar to what
dark energy is doing to the very fabric of space.
CERN hopes the high-energy collisions of the FCC could
reveal the nature of this ongoing, late-universe push and the particles that
make up dark matter.
However, it will be some time before this future particle
accelerator is ready to embark on its investigation of the dark universe.
The timeline and cost of the Future Circular Collider
In 2028, three years after the completion of the FCC
feasibility study, CERN member states will convene to decide if the FCC will
get the go-ahead. Should the future collider get greenlit, CERN says,
construction will begin in the mid-2030s.
The FCC will be completed in stages. The first stage is a
electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) that will slam together negatively charged
electrons, their positive antiparticle counterparts, known as positrons, and
other light particles. CERN adds that FCC-ee should start operations in 2045.
The second machine of the FCC will be a proton colliding
accelerator (FCC-hh) sitting alongside the FCC-ee in the same evacuated tunnel
buried under the French-Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva. This part would come online
no sooner than 2070, according to CERN.
At the CERN press conference, Gianotti laid out some of the
costs of the FCC, saying that the first FCC-ee stage alone would cost an
estimated $17 billion USD.
CERN's Director general justified the cost by adding that
the FCC is the only machine that would allow humanity to make the big jump in
studying matter needed to crack the secrets of the dark universe.