CERN has given publicity to its next idea - the construction of a successor to the Large Hadron Collider, tentatively called the Future Circular Collider (FCC).
The Research Center for Particle Physics in Geneva suggests that the new accelerator will be four times longer and ten times more powerful than the existing one.
The estimated cost of the project is £ 20 billion. The goal of the FCC's construction is to hunt for new subatomic particles until 2050.
Critics are already saying that this colossal amount of money could be better spent on other areas of research, such as, for example, fighting climate change. But CERN Director General, Professor Fabiola Gianotti, described the proposal as "an outstanding achievement." According to her, "The FCC has tremendous potential to improve our knowledge of fundamental physics and to advance many technologies with widespread impact on society."
CERN's new plans have been presented in a conceptual design report, which will now be reviewed by an international group of particle physicists, followed by the adoption of a new European strategy for particle physics. The document must be approved in 2020.
Professor John Butterworth of University College London is one of the people behind this strategy. In an interview with BBC News, he says that "this program is very ambitious, very interesting and will be my plan A."
The project involves the construction of a new circular tunnel under CERN, which will house an accelerator 100 kilometers long. Despite only a fourfold increase in the ring length, the power of the accelerator should increase by at least 10 times, which will be able to endow the accelerated electrons with colossal energy for collisions with the nuclei of lead atoms.
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Physicists hope that such collisions at these unprecedented high energies will open up a new realm of particles that really make the universe exist, as astronomers' observations have shown that there is more to the universe than can be explained by the standard physical model. Galaxies are rotating faster than they should be, and the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, although in theory it should be slowing down. Moreover, the Standard Model cannot explain gravity.
Former UK Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir David King, has been called by the UK government and the European Commission to advise on funding. In an interview with BBC News, the professor said that the time for calculating the costs is over because science opens up grandiose prospects for humanity. Big physics requires the construction of large colliders, so sooner or later there will even be a need to build a collider around the equator.