A new subatomic particle accelerator will begin operating in phases around 2050 and will be a 90.7-kilometer circular tunnel, three times larger than its predecessor, according to the preliminary technical-financial feasibility study.
The first data were presented, this Monday, by the European Particle Physics Laboratory/CERN, whose management was mandated in 2020 by the Member States, including Portugal, to study, within a period of five years, the technical-financial viability of construction of a new accelerator.
Once the feasibility study phase is over, it will be up to CERN Member States to decide, hopefully in 2025, whether the new accelerator moves forward or not.
The new machine, to be built, should succeed in the long term the Large Hadron Collider, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, operating on the French-Swiss border, underground.
According to the study presented, the new accelerator – Future Circular Collider (FCC) – would begin to be built in 2033, with the installation of equipment to be carried out from 2038 onwards.
The new machine, with which physicists intend to study the properties of matter in the Universe “on the smallest scale and at the highest energy”, would be connected underground to the LHC.
According to CERN’s general director, Fabiola Gianotti, the new accelerator, whose preliminary costs are around 14 billion euros, will be “the only machine” that will make it possible to “make a big leap in the study of matter”.
A collider is an accelerator in which two beams of particles, moving in opposite directions, intersect at several points, causing collisions with each pass.
In the LHC accelerator, a 27-kilometer circular tunnel, collisions of protons (which are hadrons) and heavy ions at high energies are generated to better understand the composition of the Universe.
In 2012, thanks to experiments carried out at the LHC, the Higgs boson was discovered, a particle that gives mass to elementary particles and which in 2013 earned the Nobel Prize in Physics for Belgian François Englert and British Peter Higgs.
According to the preliminary feasibility study of the FCC accelerator, the project is divided into two stages, the first in 2048 with an electron-positron collider, to deepen the physics of the Higgs boson, considered the cornerstone of the fundamental structure of matter.
In a second stage, scheduled for 2070, the FCC will serve to collide protons with protons with a higher energy than that of the LHC, with the aim of discovering new particles and revealing more about the composition of the Universe, which was formed 13.8 billion years ago. years.
Together, dark matter and dark energy, postulated in physical theories, make up 95% of the Universe.
The remaining 5% corresponds to visible matter, which is explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, confirmed in experiments carried out at the LHC, which will produce even more collisions and more data, in high luminosity mode, predictably from 2026 .
Portugal has participated in experiments with particle detectors at the LHC through the Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics Laboratory (LIP), which scientifically represents the country at CERN.
Particle physics technology, using proton beams, has been used in several countries to treat certain cancers.
2024-02-06 04:00:00
#subatomic #particle #accelerator #operating #close
