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CERN's New Collider Design Is Four Times Larger Than the LHC (vice.com)
If built, the Future Circular Collider will be 10 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and could discover new types of particles. From a report: The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is widely considered to be one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in history. It validated a half-century of research about the basic building blocks of matter, and remains the crowning achievement of modern particle physics. Now, CERN wants to follow up on the LHC's smashing success with a super-sized structure called the Future Circular Collider (FCC).
This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.
This next-generation particle accelerator would boast 10 times the observational power of the LHC and would stretch across 100 kilometers (62 miles), encircling the Swiss city of Geneva and much of the surrounding area. CERN published its first conceptual design report for the FCC on Tuesday. The four-volume roadmap was developed over five years by 1,300 contributors based at 150 universities, according to a statement.
The current one failed to create a black hole so they need to try again.
No sig today...
According to the article, the current cost estimate is 17 G$.
For comparison: That is 30% more than a Ford-class aircraft carrier, 40% more than the Gotthard Base Tunnel.
Well, for the cost of this monstrosity, what else could we do? Where I like dreams like this, are we SURE that we need the collision energies this new collider will give us? What burning questions will this tool help answer that the old one didn't? Are we sure there isn't any way to improve the current collider without drilling more than 180 miles of tunnels?
Yea, I know that much of what we *could* find out with this thing is nothing more than educated guessing, but I wonder about the cost and schedule needed to build something this size. Is there something else which holds more promise than driving sub-atomic particle physics to higher energies? Are there benefits here? I mean other than providing answers to settle the various bets made by proponents of the various competing theories now?
Maybe the money would be better spent on bio-medical research, genetic manipulation of food crops, Fusion energy commercialization or space exploration? Just a thought guys.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
According to the article, the current cost estimate is 17 G$.
17 Gillion Dollars??
This won't ever be built. The era of big physics is over.
Ya, but, contrary to their name, Large Hadrons are actually really, really tiny. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'd assume that it will be paid mostly by CERN member states. Top contributors to CERN's 2019 budget:
See https://fap-dep.web.cern.ch/rp... for details.
Mexico is not a CERN member state, which pay most of the CERN budget.
While Mexico has a co-operation agreement with CERN, it (like most countries with observer status or co-operation agreements, which also includes the US, Russia and China) has apparently not contributed to the 2019 budget: https://fap-dep.web.cern.ch/rp...
Well, for the cost of this monstrosity, what else could we do?
Although you alternate ideas are good, I think the very fact we don't know what we can get from this makes it a good idea. It's a good idea to invest in at least a few projects that are wild gambles that could lead to truly something new. And I say that as someone who thinks we seriously need to get humans on Mars...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Considering Europe doesn't throw billions worth of € in stupid military macho shit we've got the means to fund basic research on a grand scale. Less weapons, more science.
I'd assume that it will be paid mostly by CERN member states.
Well don't do that. The precedent has been to rely on considerable funding and resources from the US:
The US provided one-third of the cost of each detector, about $165 million to each. A lot of this was built in the US, funding US hi-tech jobs.
The US also contributed $200 million to the accelerator.
The US contributes about a third of the cost of running the detectors.
Pretty good for a mere "observer" state. Doubtless the US will be invited to observe a few billion into Future Circular Collider as well.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The era of big physics is most definitely not over but I find it hard to believe that there is sufficient justification for this kind of expenditure. We don't have any good sense of the scale of the physics required to explain Dark Matter or why the Higgs boson is so light (something called the fine-tuning or hierarchy problem).
Without knowing the energy scale we need to reach to discover new physics building the machine is dangerous because, if it doesn't find anything, then it will be almost impossible to get the even bigger machine we need to make those discoveries. We need the ILC first to do precision physics on the Higgs and use that to guide the design of the FCC. I know that's slower and more boring but I woudl rather we make any discoveries later than not at all.
The National Ignition facility is also dangerous as it means they will likely lose containment
Uh.....they ran it at full power starting in 2012. We're still here, and there were no containment failures nor underground ignition.
Ya might wanna cut back on the physics theories from video games.
I remember a lot of articles around the time they confirmed the Higgs Boson that the practical limits for physics by smashing things had been achieved, that future discoveries required so many orders of magnitude more energy that building a collider that is 10x or even 100x the size of the LHC wouldn't produce any new meaningful results. That same article (which I can't find now) said that explore the next stage of particle physics would effectively need a collider spanning around the equator and would never be buildable.
Can someone with more knowledge on this say what they intend to actually use this thing for?
I strongly suspect you could presently invest $50 billion into biology (with perhaps a side order of machine learning) before your incremental ROI declined anywhere close to this $17 b facility.
Which is not to say that this facility is worthless, but that the time is ripe for investment elsewhere.
The two main arguments for this facility are: 1) keeping the existing expertise alive; and 2) feeding the beast of existing appropriations directed to this technology sector.
I read Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (2015) within the last year and I know that the achievements in this line of research have historically been immense, and I still don't think we should continue with yet another colossal expenditure, because the point of diminishing returns is exactly the facility we just built: worth it to confirm the Higgs, but no new physics.
People were dying inside when the LHC discovered no new physics for precisely this reason.
Furthermore, even if you discover new physics at this energy scale, it surely won't trickle into practical applications—not outside of cosmological theory, in any case.
The only way this gets built is on the velocity of established funding tributaries.
Meanwhile proteomics / machine learning are poised to deliver to the 21st century what particle physics delivered to the 20th century, if we're smart enough to look forwards, rather than perseverate on former glories.
What new particle are the looking to observe with a 10-time larger collider?