Particle accelerator as powerful as 10 million lightning strikes

International scientists are building a new, powerful particle accelerator located in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 80-100 km.

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is located right next to the LHC. Photo: CERN.

More than 500 scientists from around the world gathered in Berlin, Germany, this week to work together to develop a new particle accelerator that is three times larger and seven times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Futurism reported on June 12.

The new particle accelerator is expected to take decades to build and develop. It is the LHC 2.0 version called the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Scientists hope the FCC will open a new era in physics research.

The LHC is located in a 27 km circular tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland. It is designed to carry out experiments that collide protons head-on at high speeds. The FCC will be built right next to the LHC, with a circular tunnel measuring 80-100 km in circumference.

The FCC has giant magnets twice as powerful as the LHC, capable of colliding particle beams with energies of 100 trillion electron Volts (eV), equivalent to the acceleration of particles from 10 million lightning strikes.

The FCC promises to help scientists discover more mysterious new particles even heavier than the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle that underpins our understanding of the laws of nature, discovered by the LHC in 2012.

The LHC will undergo a major upgrade in the mid-2020s, allowing for increased collision rates and measurement precision. After the upgrade, it will be renamed the Large Hadron Collider-Luminosity Enhanced (HL-LHC).

In early 2017, physicists working with the LHC announced the discovery of five new subatomic particles. They are one of several varieties of the Omega-c baryon. The discovery sheds light on the workings of the strong force that binds the components inside atoms.

According to VNE