Mark Thomson takes the reins at the CERN particle-physics lab, which recently received $1bn in private donations for its next collider project, as Michael Banks reports
Bigger and better: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will shut down later this year to make way for a major upgrade – the High-Luminosity LHC (courtesy: CERN)
The CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva has received $1bn from private donors towards the construction of the Future Circular Collider (FCC). The cash marks the first time in the lab’s 72-year history that individuals and philanthropic foundations have agreed to support a major CERN project. If built, the FCC would be the successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the Higgs boson was discovered.
CERN originally released a four-volume conceptual design report for the FCC in early 2019, with more detail included in a three-volume feasibility study that came out last year. It calls for a giant tunnel some 90.7 km in circumference – roughly three times as long as the LHC – that would be built about 200 m underground on average.
The FCC has been recommended as the preferred option for the next flagship collider at CERN in the ongoing process to update the European Strategy for Particle Physics, which will be passed over to the CERN Council in May 2026.If the plans are given the green light by CERN Council in 2028, construction on the FCC electron-positron machine, dubbed FCC-ee, would begin in 2030. It would start operations in 2047, a few years after the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) closes down, and run for about 15 years until the early 2060s.
The FCC-ee would focus on creating a million Higgs particles in total to allow physicists to study its properties with an accuracy an order of magnitude better that possible with the LHC. The FCC feasibility study then calls for a hadron machine, dubbed FCC-hh, to replace the FCC-ee in the existing 91 km tunnel. It would be a “discovery machine”, smashing together protons at high energy – about 85 TeV – with the aim of creating new particles. If built, the FCC-hh will begin operation in 2073 and run to the end of the century.
The funding model for the FCC-ee, which is expected to have a price tag of about $18bn, is still a work in progress. But it is estimated that at least two-thirds of the construction costs will come from CERN’s 24 member states with the rest needing to be found elsewhere. One option to plug that gap is private donations and in late December CERN received a significant boost from several organizations including the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and the entrepreneurs John Elkann and Xavier Niel. Together, they pledged a total of $1bn towards the FCC-ee.
Costas Fountas, president of the CERN Council, says CERN is “extremely grateful” for the interest. “This once again demonstrates CERN’s relevance and positive impact on society, and the strong interest in CERN’s future that exists well beyond our own particle physics community,” he notes.
Eric Schmidt, who founded Google, claims that he and Wendy Schmidt were “inspired by the ambition of this project and by what it could mean for the future of humanity”. The FCC, he believes, is an instrument that “could push the boundaries of human knowledge and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of the Universe” and could lead to technologies that could benefit society “in profound ways” from medicine to computing to sustainable energy.
The cash promised has been welcomed by outgoing CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti. “It’s the first time in history that private donors wish to partner with CERN to build an extraordinary research instrument that will allow humanity to take major steps forward in our understanding of fundamental physics and the universe,” she said. “I am profoundly grateful to them for their generosity, vision, and unwavering commitment to knowledge and exploration.”
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