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takyon writes:

Next-generation LHC: CERN lays out plans for €21-billion super-collider

CERN has unveiled its bold dream to build a new accelerator nearly four times as long as its 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider—currently the world's largest—and up to six times more powerful.

The European particle physics laboratory, outside Geneva, Switzerland, outlined the plan in a technical report on 15 January.

The document offers several preliminary designs for a Future Circular Collider (FCC)—which would be the most powerful particle-smasher ever built—with different types of colliders ranging in cost from around €9 billion (US$10.2 billion) to €21 billion. It is the lab's opening bid in a priority-setting process over the next two years, called the European Strategy Update for Particle Physics, and it will affect the field's future well into the second half of the century.

[...] Not everyone is convinced the super collider is a good investment. "There is no reason to think that there should be new physics in the energy regime that such a collider would reach," says Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physics at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. "That's the nightmare that everyone has on their mind but doesn't want to speak about."

Hossenfelder says that the large sums involved might be better spent on other types of huge facilities. For example, she says that placing a major radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, or a gravitational-wave detector in orbit, would be safer bets in terms of their return on science.

CERN press release and poster.

Also at The Verge.

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