What could the new collider find - and would it be worth the price tag?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. During its 10 years of operations it has led to remarkable discoveries, including the long sought-after Higgs boson.

On January 15, an international team of physicists unveiled the concept design for a new particle accelerator that would dwarf the LHC.

The “Future Circular Collider” is conceived as a successor to the LHC, and – if given the green light – it would allow physicists to seek answers to some of greatest mysteries in physics. This includes finding out what the vast majority of the universe is actually made of or discovering entirely new physics.

The proposal envisages a new 100km circumference tunnel that would be bored through the Earth, encircling the city of Geneva and the surrounding countryside. The 27km LHC would feed particles into the the new collider – like a motorway slipway. This would ultimately allow it to collide particles with energies around seven times higher than the LHC can manage. This would let this collider create particles that are beyond the reach of the LHC – pushing particle physics deep into an unexplored microscopic realm.

Portal to a dark...