{"id":14108,"date":"2021-08-17T13:40:51","date_gmt":"2021-08-17T12:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=14108"},"modified":"2021-08-17T13:40:51","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T12:40:51","slug":"discussing-the-future-circular-collider-feasibility-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/discussing-the-future-circular-collider-feasibility-study\/14108\/","title":{"rendered":"Discussing the Future Circular Collider feasibility study"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) will host a Higgs and Electroweak Factory, followed by the highest energy frontier machine ever made, which will offer a rich physics programme until the end of the century.<\/p>\n
The Higgs boson broke the news worldwide on 4 July 2012, when the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN announced its discovery. This boson completed the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles, which successfully describes all High Energy Physics (HEP) observations. With this discovery, the community of particle physicists also knew that an exciting era was opening. The Higgs boson is indeed unique among elementary particles, both by its nature (it is the only elementary particle to have no spin) and because of its novel interactions with elementary particles of matter. Shedding light on the Higgs\u2019 properties will help us understand how it is related to other open questions in modern particle physics and its role in the evolution of the Universe. Indeed, there are well known \u2018unknowns\u2019 in our understanding of the Universe as shown by the few examples given below.<\/p>\n
For instance, we know that dark matter and dark energy amount together to 95% of the energy density of the Universe, but their nature still needs to be understood. A dark matter elementary particle in the TeV1 mass range is a good candidate to be searched for at accelerators, as is being done at the CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its HL-LHC upgrade programme, which will extend until the late 2030s. But future, more precise or more sensitive investigations will be crucial to unravel its mysteries if it has been discovered, or simply to search for it if it was not in the sensitivity domain of the LHC or other presently running experiments.<\/p>\n
The fact that we live in a Universe composed of matter, the antimatter having disappeared by matter-antimatter annihilation just after the Big Bang, contradicts the predictions of the Standard Model and requires additional sources of violation of the matter-antimatter symmetry as well as matter-antimatter transition; this might (or might not) be related to the unexplained origin and values of the masses of neutrinos, which differ strongly from their associated charged leptons. Finally, the origin of the existence of three similar families of particles, while only one is sufficient to compose our visible Universe, remains mysterious.<\/p>\n
Many of these questions, and others, as further detailed in References one and three, may be solved by the existence of new particle physics phenomena \u2013 all of which require an extension of the SM, but within a very large range of energies and interaction strengths. Evidence for this new physics \u2018beyond the SM\u2019 can be obtained by high precision measurements of SM particles properties, searches for tiny violations of the SM conservation laws and for rare phenomena, or by searching for new particles at high energies. This variety of cases shows that the future of particle physics necessitates a multi-pronged approach and that the accelerator branch must rely on a versatile infrastructure\/programme like that offered at CERN by the LEP\/LHC complex, and the one foreseen with the FCC-int project (FCC-ee followed by FCC-hh), which will provide the highest precision, sensitivity and energy, to explore the known and unknown unknowns as thoroughly as possible.<\/p>\n