Once the feasibility study is complete, CERN’s member states – 22 European countries and Israel – will decide over the next five to six years whether to build the FCC.
The FCC will accelerate electrons and positrons by 2060, and then hadrons by 2090, as it seeks answers to many remaining questions in fundamental physics, with about 95 percent of the universe’s mass and energy still a mystery.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – a 27-kilometer ring running about a hundred meters below the ground – has already begun to hammer away at the unknown.
Among other things, it was used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson—dubbed the God particle—which broadened understanding of how particles gain mass, and earned two scientists who in 2013 Attested to the existence of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
But the LHC, which started operating in 2010, is expected to complete its work around 2040.
“The problem with accelerators is that at some point, no matter how much data you accumulate, you hit a wall of systematic errors,” said CERN physicist Patrick Janot.
“Around 2040-2045, we will have taken all the matter with the accuracy possible with the LHC,” he said.
“It will be time to move on to something more powerful, more luminous, to better see the forms of physics we are trying to study.”