The Guardian has an article about the forthcoming upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, which will be overseen by a new CERN Director General, Mark Thomson.
The LHC is famous for its use in discovering the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle whose existence was predicted in the 1960s as the means by which some other particles gain mass.
The latest upgrade, the high-luminosity LHC, will begin in June and take approximately five years. The superconducting magnets will be upgraded to increase the luminosity of the proton beams being collided and the detectors are also being upgraded.
It is hoped that the improved performance of the LHC will allow it to explore the interactions of Higgs bosons.
If the upgrade works, the LHC will make more precise measurements of particles and their interactions, which could find cracks in today's theories that become the foundations for tomorrow's. One remaining mystery surrounds the Higgs boson. Elementary particles gain their masses from the Higgs, but why the masses vary as they do is anyone's guess. It is not even clear how Higgs bosons interact with one another. "We could see something completely unexpected," Thomson says.
CERN also has plans to replace the LHC with a larger and more powerful collider called the Future Circular Collider, which will require a new 91km circular tunnel (compared with the LHC's 27km). There is no certainty as to what new science might be discovered with the FCC, and there are challenges obtaining sufficient funding. However, there are several fundamental questions to be explored by the new machine such as: what is the dark matter that clumps around galaxies; what is the dark energy that pushes the universe apart; why is gravity so weak; and why did matter win out over antimatter when the universe formed?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @10:40AM (4 children)
Future circular collider is a shocking power grab by CERN - both to ensure that the lab continues to exist for the next ~ 100 years and an attempt to bump the funding up by factors. Science is secondary to politics on that one.
Disclaimer: I work on other collider designs that are in competition with FCC.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday January 04, @11:22AM (3 children)
I don't have any problem with there being competition between the builders of colliders - but why is CERN's proposal a power grab more than anyone else's?
There are numerous colliders in the world but the only one that we seem to ever hear of - and the one that appears to make their discoveries public - is CERN.
You might work on an alternative but what has it achieved that we should all know about? Perhaps you should up your game with regards to PR.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Sunday January 04, @11:51AM (1 child)
One reason would be the sheer amount of funding required. These funds will not be available for other projects. If something can be measured by CERN, it has to be measured there.
mass === energy, money === power.
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Sunday January 04, @02:14PM
If the alternative that the AC is working for has achieved nothing of any substance why should it expect to be funded by public money? If it is a private initiative then let private money fund it.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Sunday January 04, @06:59PM
Up to now in particle colliders, energy (and hence physics reach) has grown, literally, exponentially in time and cost. FCC marks a step back in that achievement. It sees particle energy growing linearly in time and proportional to cost. Essentially, it is just "the same but bigger". Meanwhile the huge budget and effort required will likely suck all of the money, and brains, out of particle physics, so there is nothing new.
It marks, for me, the death of the field, an admission that they have no new ideas and nowhere to go.
There is an interesting article here, written before the LHC was finished, which goes into some of the details. If you look at the top plot on page 41, you can see that already with the LHC particle physics is falling off the exponential growth line and FCC just doubles down on this process - energy is less than the proposed but never built NLC, but the first physics is 2050:
https://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/beamline/27/1/27-1-panofsky.pdf [stanford.edu]
Luminosity (bottom figure page 41) is good, particularly below 100 GeV, but falls off rapidly above 100 GeV (where all the juicy physics is).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday January 04, @04:22PM (6 children)
LOL, the population of Europe is being replaced by people who seem to have zero interest in building giant physics projects where they currently live.
I don't think the replacement population is going to be funding CERN in 25 years much less 100 years. They're done.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday January 04, @06:44PM (4 children)
Not this crap [wikipedia.org] again... Come on, you're better than that. You apparently have a brain. Here, have a bunch of helpful links [theconversation.com].
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday January 04, @06:59PM (1 child)
LOL Europe is done. The opinions of the legacy population don't matter because they'll be replaced soon enough.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027656242400074X [sciencedirect.com]
(Score: 2, Troll) by turgid on Sunday January 04, @07:48PM
Here's one for you [psychologytoday.com]. Why are you not talking about The Aliens?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05, @01:21PM (1 child)
I read that wikipedia article and then I spent half an hour googling trying to find actual numbers. Hundreds of articles about how "the great replacement" is a debunked theory promoted by racists, and not one of them has the simple graph that would prove that. Best I could find was this PDF about it. https://soerenkern.com/pdfs/islam/MuslimPopulationEurope1950-2020.pdf [soerenkern.com]
It shows that the percentage of the population of Europe that is Muslim has been steadily increasing by about 1% per decade. Interestingly, you can see why the theory is gaining traction in France, it is outpacing the European total.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday January 05, @01:27PM
I met a guy from Turkey. It says "Muslim" on his passport. He's an atheist.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Touché) by jelizondo on Monday January 05, @12:14AM
You appear to be an American quite happy to see Europe fail.
But take into consideration the current administration dislike for science and the wholesale of projects [brennancenter.org] related to cancer research, NOAA, and others and one clear winner emerges: China
Not because they are the best, simply because they are the last player standing. As they say, nobody knows who's he working for...