CERN’s plans for a new particle accelerator dwarfs the existing LHC

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also called CERN has been at the forefront of particle physics research for many years. It houses the best and brightest minds in physics, with some of them being Nobel Laureates. The organization operates the world’s largest scientific apparatus, which is called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It is a 21 Km long circular tunnel that lies underneath the Switzerland-France border and is used mainly to study sub-atomic particles that make up the most fundamental building blocks of all matter.

CERN is now planning a successor to the illustrious LHC and calling it the FCC or Future Circular Collider, which will be bigger in every sense. It will be 100 Km long and would be able to accelerate atomic particles at far greater speeds than the LHC. These super-high-powered collisions would enable scientists to better observe and study the particles that came into existence immediately after the birth of the universe, in the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang.

The FCC, if approved will probably be the largest scientific undertaken ever, with the price expected to go higher than $20 billion. The LHC was built with a collaboration of thousands of scientists from several universities and contributions from 100 countries. It remains to be seen as to how nations collaborate on the construction of the proposed FCC.

Such particle accelerators propel beams of particles at very high speeds, almost as fast as the speed of light, and cause them to collide. The ensuing collisions cause atoms to break down to their constituent particles, allowing physicists to study the particles that makeup everything in the universe.