Skip to main content

CERN plans to build a massive particle collider that dwarfs the LHC

Designing the Future Circular Collider

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the organization that brought us the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Higgs Boson particle, is aiming to one-up itself with an even larger and more powerful circular particle collider. The proposed Future Circular Collider will eventually replace the LHC and pave the way for extensive particle physics research through the 21st century.

The LHC went online in 2010 and lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, which had been theorized but never observed until the LHC experiments. The LHC is still being used to make exciting discoveries and expected to remain operational until 2053, but it can only do so much. To go further beyond Higgs Boson, the physicists at CERN want to build another collider that will take over where the LHC left off. Because it takes so long to build a collider and bring it online, scientist are starting their planning now

More than 1,300 scientists worked for the past five years to lay out a roadmap for the future of particle physics research. The centerpiece of this proposed research plan is the Future Circular Collider which will be significantly more powerful than the LHC. The proposed collider will have a circumference of 62 miles and energy of up to 100 TeV as compared to the 16 miles and 13 TeV for the LHC. Scientists will meet for the next two years to discuss the plans for the Future Circular Collider and particle physics research. Once constructed, the new particle collider will have a lifespan of between 15 to 20 years.  It is expected to cost 9 billion euros (about $10.25 billion) to design and build.

Scientists hope a more powerful collider will open the door to a new world of physics, just like it did when they discovered the Higgs boson particle with the LHC. Scientists will be able to delve deeper into the Higgs Boson and other aspects of subatomic physics, some of which lie outside the existing Standard Model of particle physics. An even larger circular collider also may help researchers explore topics such as dark matter and matter-antimatter interactions. These experiments could lead to a better understanding of the origin and early development of our universe.

Editors' Recommendations

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more