Important Takeaways:
- Scientists are refining plans to build the world’s biggest machine at a site beneath the Swiss-French border. More than $30bn (£23bn) would be spent drilling a 91km [approximately 56.5 mile] circular tunnel in which subatomic particles would be accelerated to near light speeds and smashed into each other. From the resulting nuclear debris, scientists hope they will then find clues that would help them understand the detailed makeup of the universe.
- It is an extraordinarily ambitious project. However, it is also a controversial one – for many scientists fear the machine, the Future Circular Collider (FCC), could soak up funding for subatomic physics for decades and leave promising new research avenues starved of resources.
- Since its formation in 1954, Cern – which is based in Geneva – has become a much-lauded example of the effectiveness of international scientific cooperation and has earned itself a reputation for generating world-leading research over the decades.
- Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – currently the world’s biggest machine – revealed the existence, in 2012, of the Higgs particle. This was the first direct evidence that a field – known as the Higgs field – permeates the universe and is responsible for giving different fundamental particles their various masses.
- However, the LHC is scheduled for closure by 2040 and many puzzles about the structure of the universe remain unsolved, despite hopes it would provide more major insights. Persisting mysteries include the nature of dark matter, whose existence is inferred from its gravitational influences on galaxies but whose exact makeup is unknown. Similarly, the fact that our universe is made up of matter – while antimatter is almost nonexistent – cannot be explained from current observations.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Cern aims to build €20bn collider to unlock secrets of universe
- Research lab submits plans for next-generation model at least three times size of Large Hadron Collider
- Officials at Cern, home to the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, are pressing ahead with plans for a new machine that would be at least three times bigger than the existing particle accelerator.
- The Large Hadron Collider, built inside a 27km [16.77miles] circular tunnel beneath the Swiss-French countryside, smashes together protons and other subatomic particles at close to the speed of light to recreate the conditions that existed fractions of a second after the big bang.
- The machine, the world’s largest collider, was used in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012
- But since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the collider has not revealed any significant new physics that might shed light on some of the deepest mysteries of the universe, such as the nature of dark matter or dark energy, why matter dominates over antimatter, and whether reality is permeated with hidden extra dimensions.
- Cern drew up plans for the next machine, the Future Circular Collider (FCC), in 2019. The €20bn (£17bn) machine would have a 91km [56.54 miles] circumference and aim to smash subatomic particles together at a maximum energy of 100 teraelectronvolts (TeV). The Large Hadron Collider achieves maximum energies of 14TeV.
- Prof Fabiola Gianotti, the director general of Cern, said: “If approved, the FCC would be the most powerful microscope ever built to study the laws of nature at the smallest scales and highest energies, with the goal of addressing some of the outstanding questions in today’s fundamental physics and our understanding of the universe.”
- Tara Shears, a member of the LHCb experiment said: “…At the moment we’re carrying out a study to see if the machine is feasible. That should be finished in 2025, with a decision on the best way forward by 2028.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
