Difficulties in civil engineering and infrastructure, administrative, environmental and above all financial constraints … The project still in the feasibility study of the future Circular Collider, ten times more efficient than the large Hadron Collider, encounter many obstacles.
by
At a time when the largest and more powerful particle accelerators, the large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, left for a third phase of experiences, its successor is being prepared. What if the LHC is nicknamed “The Lord of the Rings”, how to qualify his heir? Ten times more powerful, producing a thousand times more collisions, and installed in a tunnel more than three times larger (91 kilometers against 27), the FCC, for future circular collider, impresses.
In Paris, from May 30 to June 3, a conference took stock of this project, not yet formally decided. The feasibility study is underway and will be rendered in 2025 to feed a firm decision of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) which pilot the project, around 2028. Two years later will begin the construction of the underground ring , between 140 and 230 meters deep, which will be stuck, mainly in France, between the Jura and the Alps with a passage under Lake Geneva and brushing against the north of Annecy. The first collisions will be expected in 2045. These will concern electrons and not heavier protons, such as LHC. The latter will arrive around 2070. “It is the infrastructure of a century!”, Found Tor Raubenheimer, member of the FCC project, at the Conference.
Especially since the first studies started ten years ago. “These ideas have taken time to impose themselves. We have faced opposite winds, successively recognize Alain Blondel and Patrick Janot, scientific managers of the project, sitting on a sunny bench of the Cordeliers cloister during a break from the conference. It was a delight this morning to hear these presentations praising the merits of the machine. She does all the physics that we want and better than other proposals. “In less than two minutes of operation, she will produce as many A particle, called “Z”, that the accelerator The great electrositron collision (LEP) in seven years (between 1989 and 1995)…
China on the ranks
But not all obstacles are crossed. The feasibility study must take stock of the exact location, the design of the installation, the constraints of civil engineering, infrastructure (roads, evacuation of rubble, etc.), administrative (protected areas, authorizations, etc.), environmental and financial. The cost of construction is estimated at 10.9 billion Swiss francs (10.6 billion euros), that is to say the cost of the LHC, but the CERN has only half this budget. “The discussions begin to seek these funds from the two host countries (France and Switzerland), CERN member states, non-members or private funds,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director General at the opening of the Conference.
You have 39.54% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.