Flagship projects

High Luminosity LHC

The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) project aims to crank up the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries after 2029. The objective is to increase the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC’s design value.
The High-Luminosity LHC, which should be operational from the beginning of 2029, will increase the number of collisions to study fundamental components of matter in more detail. It will allow physicists to study known mechanisms in greater detail, such as the Higgs boson, and to observe rare new phenomena that might reveal themselves.

LHC dipole magnets in the tunnel (© CERN, Ordan, Julien Marius)

HiLumi high-brightness cryostat prototype (© CERN, M Brice)

Future Circular Collider

The Future Circular Collider is the project for a future gigantic accelerator that could represent the future beyond the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and that is included in the European Strategy for Particle Physics. With its 27 km circumference, the LHC is currently the most powerful particle collider in the world. The High Luminosity phase (HL-LHC), will increase the machine’s discovery potential with a programme of research up to 2040. But CERN and the particle physics scientific community is already thinking beyond the LHC with the project of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) that published a feasibility study , to be completed by 2025.

The Xenonnt and Darkside-20k experiments

Being able to detect and study dark matter is one of the fundamental challenges of modern physics. Postulated to explain gravitational phenomena observed in the universe, although it is as much as five times more abundant than ordinary matter, and despite there being many experiments worldwide that are trying to detect its traces, to date dark matter has not yet been experimentally observed.

The DarkSide-50 experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratories. (© LNGS/INFN, Y. Suvorov)

Rendering of the underground infrastructure (© EGO/INFN)

Einsten Telescope

The Einstein Telescope (ET) is the large research infrastructure that will host the future gravitational wave detector to be built in Europe, a project with global scientific and technological impact. Italy is a candidate to host it in Sardinia in the area of the disused Sos Enattos mine.
ET is considered a leading project at an international level, so much so that it is included in the Roadmap of ESFRI 2021 (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), the European body that indicates which scientific infrastructures are crucial to invest in in Europe, thanks to a proposal Italian guide, supported by Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

EUPRAXIA

EUPRAXIA is a distributed, compact and innovative accelerator facility based on plasma technology, to be carried out in Europe and it has its Italian headquarters at the Frascati National Laboratory of INFN. The project is included in the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure) roadmap, the European strategic forum that identifies the major research infrastructures to invest in at the European level.

Photograph of the 3 cm long capillary with 1 mm diameter currently in operation in the SPARC_LAB laboratory in Frascati. The pink light is emitted by the plasma confined by the capillary during the phase following the ionization of the gas (hydrogen). (© INFN)

KM3NET

Km3net is the most extensive underwater research infrastructure in the world. Located deep in the Mediterranean Sea, it houses two neutrino telescopes: ARCA off the coast of Capo Passero in Sicily and ORCA off the coast of Toulon, France. Neutrinos are among the most abundant and elusive particles in the universe: in number they are second only to photons. While, on the one hand, their ability to pass through matter almost completely undisturbed makes them very difficult to observe (every second, billions of neutrinos from the Sun pass through our bodies, without us noticing), on the other, it characterises them as carriers of valuable information for studying the distant universe and dense astrophysical objects such as the centre of the Sun or stars.