Plans materialise for new particle accelerator in Geneva

“We have not found any technical obstacles so far,” said Fabiola Gianotti, Director General of CERN. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

Preparations for a huge new particle accelerator in Geneva have reached a milestone. After several years of work, a feasibility study for the project has now been finalised, CERN announced on Monday evening.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

On this basis, the CERN member states intend to make a final decision on the construction of the accelerator, known as the Future Circular Collider (FCC), by 2028.

“We have not found any technical obstacles so far,” said Fabiola Gianotti, Director General of CERN, summarising the feasibility study to the AFP news agency. The project is well on track.

The FCC is intended to eclipse the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the current particle accelerator in Geneva. In the feasibility study, a 90.7 kilometre long, circular accelerator, on average 200 metres underground, was chosen as the best option for the project, CERN wrote. This would make the FCC more than three times the size of the LHC. The tunnel for the machine is to be installed between Geneva and neighbouring France.

The FCC is crucial for Europe to maintain its leading role in basic science, said Gianotti.

+ CERN to expel 500 Russian scientists from November 30

Inside the huge tunnel, the particles are to be accelerated until they collide with seven times the collision energy of the LHC. As a first step, however, another accelerator is to be placed in the tunnel, which, according to CERN, will make it possible to maximise the production of Higgs bosons and investigate their properties in more detail.

The estimated costs for the construction of the first phase of the FCC, including the tunnel and the entire infrastructure, amount to CHF15 billion ($17 billion), which would have to be invested within 12 years. The majority of the funding would come from CERN’s current annual budget, the research centre stated.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].