According to the new CERN report, the FCC could have a 62-mile (100 kilometers) track in the same region of Europe -- that's four times larger than the LHC. When completed, the FCC should be capable of smashing atoms at unprecedented energies of up to 100 TeV. The FCC wouldn't simply be a larger version of the LHC, either. It will need more powerful electromagnets, new detectors, improved superconducting materials, and enhanced computing facilities to process all the data it gathers. Some of the necessary technologies don't exist yet, but we've got time. The FCC is a forward-looking project that aims to plan for what comes after the LHC, which could operate until around 2030. CERN believes it will take around 20 years to design and build the FCC. It could be 2040 or 2050 before this instrument is up and running.
Among the most notable achievements of the Large Hadron Collider is the 2012-2013 discovery of the Higgs boson, first theorized by Peter Higgs in 1964. While we know it exists, the nature of the Higgs is still murky. Higher-energy collisions from the improved LHC might shed some light on it, but scientists may need to wait for the FCC to study the particle in detail. The LHC will continue to make discoveries for years to come, but you can expect to start hearing more about the FCC project as we move into the next decade. Now read: Top image credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN
