CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is quite big, as the name suggests, at 17 miles long. It asked for recommendations from 1,300 contributors back in 2014 for a feasible plan to build a new collider that would be significantly bigger than the LHC. CERN has now unveiled the preliminary designs for this project called the Future Circular Collider which will make the LHC tiny in comparison.
According to the plan, this massive particle accelerator is going to be 62 miles long and up to six times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. The head of CERN’s theory department Gian Francesco Giudice put the leap in perspective by describing it as planning a trip not to Mars, but to Uranus.”
Researchers would obviously be hoping that the significantly more powerful FCC is able to discover new particles due to its more powerful collisions. On the other hand, the LHC hasn’t discovered any new particles other than the Higgs Boson.
As you can probably imagine, this project isn’t going to come cheap. It’s expected to cost around $24 billion and there’s no guarantee either that just because it’s powerful it will end up discovering a new particle.
CERN will be using the LHC for a few more decades before some like the FCC will be brought into operation so it’s going to be a long time before we hear about any discoveries, or lack thereof, from a project of this magnitude.