CERN's Next Particle Accelerator Is Hilariously Massive

CERN's Next Particle Accelerator Is Hilariously Massive
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As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider is an absolutely enormous particle accelerator built under the Earth near to Lake Geneva. It's so large that it actually crosses the French-Swiss border in four separate places.

Compared to the next one, it's minuscule.

Gizmodo today has an interesting write-up on the Future Circular Collider, the proposed replacement for the LHC designed to take particle physics beyond the Higgs-Boson into higher and higher energies.

We recommend you read it - the piece looks at recent decisions to examine the possibility of building the 80-100km tunnel and how it might practically happen.

It also takes in the recent news that CERN has chosen Arup to engineer a model of the new accelerator, and work out design details.

But we felt we had to republish this one image in the meantime.

Open Image Modal

This is a map proposed to illustrate the scale of the new collider. If built, it would be able to improve on the energy of the particle beam at LHC from 7TeV to 100 TeV.

It would also cost $20 billion.

Incidentally, while you might only know about CERN the world actually has a ton of particle accelerators. Here's a map of all of them.

View WORLD OF ACCELERATORS in a larger map