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

The next head of Europe’s CERN physics laboratory said Thursday that he favored moving forward with plans for a giant particle collider far more powerful than the collider that discovered the famous “God particle”.

“Scientifically, I am convinced it is the right option,” Mark Thomson, whom CERN has tapped to be its next director-general, said 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 the helm for a five-year term starting in January 2026.

“Absolutely I wish to pursue that route,” he said.

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

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

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

The LHC is expected to have fully run its course by around 2040, and CERN is considering building a far larger collider to allow scientists to keep pushing the envelope.

Hunt for dark matter

A feasibility study is under way for the 91-kilometer FCC, which CERN estimated earlier this year will cost around $17 billion.

Thomson, an experimental particle physics professor at Cambridge University and the executive chair of Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, hailed the efforts to fully grasp the costs involved, saying a final decision was still several years off.

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

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

“We are confronted with many crucial outstanding 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 was not 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 on them—accounts for just five percent of the universe.

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

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

“I’m optimistic that some of the experiments that have been constructed and operated at the moment have an opportunity to actually discover what dark matter really is,” he said.

© 2024 AFP