The largest man-made scientific experiment is in high energy physics and its planning started in the mid seventies. The project was coined as the Large Electron Positron (LEP) Collider and since its start in 1989 it has been providing a trove of findings which eventually led to the Nobel Prize in physics (1999). The 27 km circular tunnel in which electrons and positrons were brought to collision lasted for 12 years, until 2001, and got a new life as a proton-proton collider under a new name, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was proposed in the mid eighties and started operation in 2009. Already in its first run the CMS and ATLAS experiments simultaneously and independently discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 which lead to another Nobel Prize in physics (2013).

In 2013 the study for a massive new accelerator – like LEP/LHC on steroids – was approved based on CERN’s council decision. The study is called the Future Circular Collider (FCC) study and proposes to build a collider with 100 km circumference, almost four times as long as the existing LEP/LHC complex with an unprecedented reach in terms of energy and precision. The sequence of colliders copies the LEP/LHC idea and is expected to serve the vibrant community that will grow out of the present LHC community to provide them for decades with exciting physics measurements and possibly ground breaking discoveries. Discoveries do not come easy or cheap and there are no guarantees, but what is guaranteed is that we will challenge our understanding of the world at a level never reached before and we will enter into territory never explored by humans before.

We are currently involved in the Feasibility Studies for the realization of the FCC collider. Our goal is to understand the physics reach that such a detector might have, for example in electroweak measurements of the Z mass and width, the Higgs invisible width, and much more. This project has been a great opportunity to get the next generation of physicists involved and excited about the future of the field, as you can read here!