Future Circular Collider (FCC) - Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

The Future Circular Collider is the project for a future gigantic accelerator that could represent the future byond 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 Future Circular Collider Study (FCC) is developing designs for a new research infrastructure to host the next generation of higher performance particle colliders to extend the research currently being conducted at CERN. The study explores different collider options, combined into a single research infrastructure built in a 100km underground tunnel, it can offer a solid and diverse physics programme extending beyond the end of the century.

INFN is involved in FCC through the acronym RD-FCC, with a complex research and development activity aimed at the creation of the IDEA detector (Innovative Detector for Electron-positron Accelerator), and also through the study of the infrastructure to be implemented and the design of the lepton accelerator.

Scientific goals

The goal of the FCC is to push the energy and intensity frontiers of particle colliders, with the aim of reaching collision energies of 100 TeV, in the search for new physics.
One of the core goals of the FCC programme is to directly observe and study these interactions of the Higgs, with the W and Z bosons, quarks and leptons, and of the Higgs with itself, the keystone of the Standard Model of particle physics.

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

The FCC will also offer a broad physics programme beyond the Higgs sector, including searches for answers to many of the other major open questions of particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter, the origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the Universe, and the source of neutrino masses. This diverse physics programme will be enabled by the unprecedented precision, sensitivity and energy reach of CERN’s Future Circular Colliders.

Timeline

If the outcome of the feasibility study is positive, CERN’s Member States and its international partners may endorse a more in-depth technical feasibility study of the project. This process could endorse the next steps towards the final approval of this project and start of construction after the middle 2030s, with the first step of an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) beginning operations around 2045. A second machine, colliding protons (FCC-hh) in the same tunnel would extend the research programme from the 2070s to the end of the century.

Resources: https://fcc.web.cern.ch/