Context: European Council for Nuclear Research, popularly known as CERN, plans to build a 91-kilometer-long largest particle collider underneath the Earth below the French and Switzerland borders.
About Future Circular Collider
- Future Circular Collider is a proposed 91 km long at the CERN. It will overtake the 27 km long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility LHC is currently world’s largest particle collider.
- Construction of the machine will require drilling a circular tunnel 200 metres underground. The facility will also have four experimental halls.
- The facility will be used to collide electrons with their antimatter particles, positrons, with the aim of generating and studying in precise detail around one million Higgs bosons and other Standard Model particles.
- FCC-hh: for hadron-hadron collisions, including proton-proton and heavy ion collisions.
- FCC-ee: for electron-positron collisions
- FCC-eh: for electron-hadron collisions
- The second step would be an energy frontier collider, offering collision energies of 100 TeV or higher (i.e., 8 times the energy of the LHC) following developments in the superconducting and magnet technologies.
- The final approval for the Future Circular Collider (FCC) will be given by CERN Council
Concerns against the Future Circular Collider
- High cost of constructing the facility: Future Circular Collider facility will cost around 15 billion Swiss Francs. Bulk of the funding will come from the existing CERN budget. But the project will still require financial contributions from the countries that are full members of CERN (European Countries, USA & Japan etc.)
- Criticism of design: A section of physicists have argued against the FCC’s design which aims to collide electrons with positrons. They have argued for colliding beams of muons instead of electrons or protons. Muons are much more massive than electrons, allowing for higher-energy collisions.
Other Proposed Particle Accelerators
- High Luminosity LHC: High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider project aims to crank up the performance of the LHC to increase by increasing the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value. Luminosity is an important indicator of the performance of a particle accelerator as it is proportional to the number of collisions that occur in a given amount of time. The HL-LHC will produce at least 15 million Higgs bosons per year, compared to around three million from LHC. It is expected to be operational from 2029.
- International Linear Collider (Japan): A proposed linear particle accelerator with a planned collision energy of 500 GeV with a possibility for a later upgrade to 1000 GeV. The ILC would collide electrons with positrons with length between 30 & 50 km. This will be more than 10 times as long as the 50 GeV Stanford Linear Accelerator, longest existing linear particle accelerator. Japan has shown interest in hosting the long planned International Linear Collider.
- Circular Electron Positron Collider (China): A proposed Chinese electron positron collider. It would be world’s largest particle accelerator with a circumference of 100 kms.
- Muon Collider: Particle Physicists in the US have called for building a muon collider. Muons are like electrons but about 200 times heavier. However, muons are unstable and quicly decay into other particles.
About CERN
- CERN is an intergovernmental organisation that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
- Established in 1954.
- Based in Meyrin, western suburb of Geneva, on the France-Switzerland border.
- Governance: CERN Council is the highest authority of the organisation.
- CERN is an official UNGA observer. CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – consequently, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations.
- Member States of CERN: Currently, there 23 member states of CERN: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Israel is the only non-European full member. (Cyprus, Estonia and Slovenia are Associate Member States in pre-stage to membership).
- Associate Members of CERN: Croatia, India, Latvia, Lithuania, Pakistan, Turkiye and Ukraine. (India is also Associate member of CERN).