New giant particle collider ‘right option for science’: CERN’s next chief

The incoming head of the European physics laboratory CERN said on Thursday that he favored moving ahead with plans for a giant particle collider far more powerful than the collider that discovered the famous “God particle”.

“Scientifically, I’m convinced it’s the right option,” said Mark Thomson, whom CERN has chosen as its next director-general, of preliminary plans for the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

It is “the right option for CERN, the right option for science,” the British physicist said during an online press conference a day after CERN said he would take over for a five-year term starting in January 2026.

“Absolutely I want to go that route,” he said.

The CERN laboratory, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, seeks to find out what the universe is made of and how it works.

Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a 27-kilometer (17-mile) proton-smashing ring that runs about 100 meters (330 feet) underground — has been used, among other things, to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.

Dubbed the God particle, its discovery expanded science’s understanding of how particles gain mass.

The LHC is expected to have run its full course around 2040, and CERN is considering building a much larger collider to allow scientists to continue pushing the envelope.

The Hunt for Dark Matter

A feasibility study is underway for the 91-kilometer FCC, which CERN estimated earlier this year would cost about $17 billion.

Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge and executive chairman of Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, welcomed efforts to fully understand the costs involved, saying a final decision was still years away.

“There is time to build a very, very strong consensus around the project based on the clear scientific case” for it, he said.

At CERN, Thomson will replace the Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, who a decade ago was chosen as the first woman to lead the laboratory. She has also expressed support for the FCC project.

“We are faced with many important unsolved questions in fundamental physics and in our understanding of the structure and evolution of the universe,” she told reporters.

Both Gianotti and Thomson said the search for answers wasn’t waiting for the FCC to be built, with so-called dark matter and dark energy among the issues being explored.

Scientists believe that ordinary matter – such as stars, gases, dust, planets and everything in them – makes up only five percent of the universe.

But dark matter and dark energy make up the rest, and scientists have yet to directly observe either.

“We know dark matter is there, (but) we don’t know the nature of dark matter,” Thomson said.

“I’m optimistic that some of the experiments that are being built and operated right now have a shot at actually finding out what dark matter really is,” he said.

© 2024 AFP