Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Science myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Scientists want to push ahead with a €16bn expansion of the world’s biggest particle accelerator to probe the universe’s secrets even more deeply, defying critics who say the money would be better spent on more practical areas of research.
Executives at Cern near Geneva expect next year to complete a feasibility study on construction of the so-called Future Circular Collider (FCC) — a 91km ring more than three times the size of the existing Large Hadron Collider.
The debate over the proposed expansion highlights wider arguments over how to allocate precious funding for “pure science” ventures at a time of rapid technological advances and growing global threats such as pandemics and climate change.
The new supercollider would not only probe fundamental physics, said Fabiola Gianotti, Cern’s director-general, but also serve to boost practical developments in fields including cryogenics, superconducting magnets and batteries.
“The FCC will not only be a wonderful instrument to improve our understanding of fundamental laws of physics and of nature,” she said at a briefing on Monday. “It will also be a driver of innovation.”
The expansion project would seek co-operation with — and potentially additional funding from — countries beyond Cern’s 23-nation membership, which comprises 18 EU states, Israel, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and the UK, Gianotti said. The Large Hadron Collider has benefited greatly from the contribution of countries such as the US and Japan, she added.
“Cern has a history of collaboration with non-member states and the FCC will be even more . . . an international if not a global project,” she said.
An interim report on the FCC proposal was submitted to Cern’s governing council, which met last week. The representatives of the body did not identify “any technological or scientific show-stoppers” that would hinder the proposed expansion, said Eliezer Rabinovici, the council’s president.
No final decisions have been made on whether to go ahead with the project or on how funding would be mobilised from members and non-members, Cern executives said.
The FCC plan has intensified the debate over the wisdom of large investments in big-ticket science ventures versus more targeted projects with clear practical benefits.
Switzerland-based Cern has been striving for a sequel to its Nobel Prize winning 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called “god particle” that completed the standard model used to explain particle physics.
Sabine Hossenfelder, a leading German theoretical physicist, has said the proposed Cern expansion project will be more expensive but have less discovery potential than its predecessors, meaning it is not a good investment.
The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons normally found at the heart of atoms almost to the speed of light and smashes them together to produce new particles. Some of these incredibly shortlived species of matter are the same as those that existed in the early universe, so observing their decay offers a rare window into cosmic time.
The Large Hadron Collider was restarted in 2022 after a three-year shutdown to improve the power and precision of its investigations into whether there is a still deeper “new physics” beyond the standard model.
Research targets including explaining the nature of “dark matter”, which is more regarded as being much more abundant in the universe than conventional matter yet is undetectable to existing scientific instruments.
Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was the birthplace of the internet more than 30 years ago, showing how “pure science” projects can yield unexpected developments that have a transformative real-world impact.
“Cern has significantly advanced our understanding of the universe, while seeding innovations with huge economic impact — not least the world wide web,” said Louis Barson, director of science, innovation and skills at the UK’s Institute of Physics.
Read the full article here
