Adrian ChoIt is a truth universally acknowledged that a physics laboratory with a world-leading scientific facility must have a plan for an even better machine to succeed it.
So it is with the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, which is home to the world’s biggest atom smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Today, CERN’s governing council announced it will launch a technical and financial feasibility study to build an even bigger collider 80 to 100 kilometers long (actually two of them in succession) that could ultimately reach an energy seven times higher than the LHC.