Scientists refine plans to build the largest machine in the world on a site under the border of the Swiss franchise. More than $ 30 billion (23 billion pounds sterling) would be spent to form a circular tunnel of 91 km in which the subatomic particles would be accelerated at close and broken speeds in each other. According to the resulting nuclear debris, scientists hope that they will then find clues that would help them understand the detailed composition of the universe.
It is an extraordinarily ambitious project. However, it is also controversial – for many scientists fear the machine, Future Circular Collider (FCC)could absorb funding of subatomic physics for decades and leave new promising research paths hungry for resources.
Others argue that the mega-collister is imposed on physicists by senior officials at CernThe European organization for nuclear research, without correctly consulting the researchers.
“I am amazed to see how they align this concept,” said the physicist of the Halina Abramowicz particles of the University Tel Aviv Observer. “This is not how things are supposed to work. The physics community is supposed to tell CERN what should be the next step, not the other way around. ”
These arguments led the newspaper Nature warn this month that “a battle is underway for the future of particle physics“.
For its part, CERN says that the FCC offers scientists a chance to undertake “a unique exploration of space, time and matter”. The plan is supported by many superior physicists and promoted vigorously by the current director general of the CERN, Fabiola Gianotti, and also supported by Mark Thomson, who should take control of his post in January 2026. “If it is approved, the FCC would become the most powerful instrument ever built to study the laws of nature at the most fundamental level,” said Gianotti ” Nature.
Since its training in 1954, CERN – which is based in Geneva – has become a much appreciated example of the effectiveness of international scientific cooperation and has acquired to generate global research during the decades.
It is Large collision of Hadrons (LHC) – Currently, the largest machine in the world – revealed the existence, in 2012, of the Higgs particle. It was the First direct proof that a field – known as the Higgs field – permeates the universe and is responsible for giving different fundamental particles their different masses.
However, the LHC is planned for the closure by 2040 and many puzzles concerning the structure of the universe remain unresolved, despite the hope that it would provide more important information. The persistent mysteries include the nature of dark matter, whose existence is deduced from its gravitational influences on galaxies but whose exact makeup is unknown. Likewise, the fact that our universe is made up of matter – while the antimatrice is almost nonexistent – cannot be explained current observations.
To get around these problems, the CERN proposed to build its new mega-collister, which would be a much more powerful and larger version of the LHC. It would be built in two stages. The first would generate Higgs particles in large numbers in order to understand their essential role in the influence of other fundamental forces and appear online around 2040. Then, it would be reused after a few decades so that it can collide the protons to large energies and provide new data on the universe. This version would start operations around 2070.
However, the technology to speed up unrivaled energies proposed for the FCC does not yet exist. It is simply supposed that, in 40 years, it will have been developed. Such a hypothesis is worried about certain scientists, as well as the fact that the FCC will cost so much that he will see scientists in a device that would monopolize the funds for particles for decades.
“What worries me the most is that by investing all this money, we will stop the development of other technologies because there will be no money for them. The FCC could soak up funds for years and years,” said Abramowicz, who rejected the idea of the mega-collier as “a toy” which could certainly not be guaranteed to repair the tables that exist in the Mega-collier.
Instead, researchers suggested that linear accelerators – who drew particles in a straight line – could prove to be cheaper, more flexible and more likely to obtain results than a circular collision. This point was supported by Jenny List, a researcher based in the German accelerator Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Desy) in Hamburg.
“There are other technologies on the horizon that could be used to accelerate particles like proton without the need for huge magnets or tunnels,” she said. “Plasma waves technology is one of them.
However, if the FCC received the green light, it could enclose funds for decades and end up dictating the direction that particles physics will have to take for a large part of the century, added list.
“We are going to say exactly the future generations what to do scientifically, and we must therefore wonder today: who must we decide what our grandchildren should look for and not seek?”