An interesting crowd has gathered to a strategic, invitation-only meeting at SUNY, Stony Brook on Long Island.
We are discussing the planning for the future. This is interesting and also not interesting, because the options are well known and nothing really new has come up. Hopefully we will get people to talk and come closer to a common plan.
One interesting number that people always ask is the cost of the new projects. The cost for the FCC-ee, which is for now at least the front runner pushed by CERN, is in the range of $14-18B. That is very expensive, but if we try to put this into context the LEP project was about $1.4B and started taking data in 1989, while the LHC was $4.75B and started data taking in 2010. If we adjust for inflation and assume that FCC starts today we would have a cost equivalent for LEP of $3.74B and for LHC $6.87B (btw. I used ChatGPT to make the estimates). So, there is clearly an increase in cost, but there is some room for cost reduction and we have to acknowledge that the machines have to become more and more sophisticated to push the boundaries at the energy frontier.
The talk by Michael Benedikt on FCC was of course on the agenda but also ILC/C^3, and going directly to a smaller hh machines were discussed.
The agenda can be found here.