CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has set in motion plans to build a new 100-kilometer circular supercollider.
The Large Hadron Collider, by comparison, is 27 kilometers long.
It is currently being upgraded, and expected to restart again in May 2021 until 2024, before starting its final run in 2027.
The new machine, called the Future Circular Collider, would likely cost at least €21 billion. It is expected to be build in an underground location in Geneva by approximately 2038.
While final approval has not yet been given, CERN can take a more proactive approach in designing the collider, utilising resources otherwise allocated to alternative designs such as a linear eletron-positron collider or a muon accelerator, according to Nature.
The later stages of CERN’s development will be building an electron-positron collider to produce and study the Higgs boson.
That machine would then be dismantled and replaced with a proton smasher, which would search for new particles to complete or disprove our current understanding of physics.
By 2050, it could be smashing the particles together with approximately six times the force (100 teraelectronvolts) as the Large Hadron Collider.
“It’s probing nature at the shortest distances and looking for the smallest things we can see … it’s a real exploratory mission. Everyone agrees that’s what we need to do. The question has been: what’s the best machine to do it?” said Professor Jon Butterworth of University College London.
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Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas from fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010
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The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012
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Death of a star: This image from Nasa’s Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy
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Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa’s New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth
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An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust
Nasa
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The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth
Getty
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Pluto, as pictured by Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015
Nasa/APL/SwRI
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A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun
Nasa
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Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand
Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona
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Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015
Nasa/Scott Kelly
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Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas from fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010
Nasa/ESA/STScI
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The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012
Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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Death of a star: This image from Nasa’s Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy
Nasa
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Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa’s New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth
Getty
5/10
An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust
Nasa
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The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth
Getty
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Pluto, as pictured by Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015
Nasa/APL/SwRI
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A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun
Nasa
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Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand
Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona
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Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015
Nasa/Scott Kelly
However, the plan is not universally approved in the physics community. Scientists have said that it is a high-risk, high-reward scenario with little guarantee of getting a return on investment.
“We’re talking about tens of billions. I just think there is not enough scientific potential in doing that kind of study right now,” Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, told The Guardian.
“On some level I find it irresponsible,” she said. “Why don’t we put the money into an international centre for climate models or pandemic models?”
