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CERN’s supercollider plan: $17-billion ‘Higgs factory’ would dwarf LHC

A feasibility study on the Future Circular Collider identifies where and how the machine could be built — but its construction is far from a done deal.
By
  1. Elizabeth Gibney
  2. Davide Castelvecchi
An artistic representation of the FCC-hh (proton-proton collider) showing a large metal pipe in an underground tunnel.

The Future Circular Collider would use a 91-kilometre tunnel to smash together electrons and positrons (artist’s impression). Credit: PIXELRISE

Europe is pushing forwards with plans to build a 91-kilometre-long, 15-billion-Swiss-franc (US$17-billion) supercollider underneath the French and Swiss countryside. The machine would allow researchers to study the Higgs boson in detail. But scientists are under pressure to convince funders that such an enormous investment is worth it, following the lack of new physics revealed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

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Nature 626, 468 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00353-9

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