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April 2, 2025 - Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator, have revealed plans for a much larger successor, the Future Circular Collider, which aims to solve the remaining enigmas of physics.
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The plans for the Future Circular Collider (FCC) – a nearly 91-kilometre loop along the French-Swiss border and beneath Lake Geneva – were published on April 1, finalising details for a project nearly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The FCC will be nearly three times the circumference of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and twice as deep.
The project is projected to cost around $16 billion and is expected to begin in the mid-2040s, pending approval from CERN’s 24 member countries (all European, except for Israel) in 2028.
The greatest achievement of the LHC was the 2012 detection of the Higgs boson, a crucial piece of the Standard Model puzzle that helps explain fundamental forces in the universe. However, since then, its ambition to uncover two of physics’ greatest mysteries – dark matter and dark energy – has remained unfulfilled. The FCC could play a key role in that pursuit.
While the project is extraordinarily ambitious, it is also highly controversial – many scientists fear that the FCC could monopolise funding for subatomic physics for decades, leaving other promising research areas underfunded.