Decision To Create Largest Ever Particle Accelerator FCC May Be Made By 2020 - CERN Chief

GENEVA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st November, 2018) The decision to create the largest ever particle accelerator, Future Circular Collider (FCC), can be made by 2020, following the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, Director General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Fabiola Gianotti told Sputnik in an interview.

"We are now starting � at the beginning of next year � a process which is called update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. This is a process lasting about 1.5 years, when the European particle physics community get together to develop a strategy and a road map for the coming years. It typically takes place every 6-7 years to take stock of what's up for previous years, the projects that CERN is developing in terms of future collider, like CLICK [and] FCC, but also other projects in terms of antimatter facility ... All this will be discussed in that framework, and then priorities will be established. So we will know in 2020 what the priorities are," she said.

The FCC is not yet an approved project, she stressed.

"CERN, at the moment, is developing at the level of design studies two possible versions of accelerators. One is a linear collider, electron-positron collider called CLICK. And the other one is a circular collider called Future Circular Collider, FCC," she said.

Gianotti believes that the best discovery at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would be to detect the particles that make up the dark matter.

"Regardless and irrespective of the awards which are important, of course, but we doing a science for the sake of improving our knowledge. Of course, for me, the best possible discovery at CERN will be if we could discover the dark matter particle, the particles that constitute the dark matter. But everything is in the hands of nature. We do not know what kind of new physics or new particles nature has decided to put in the energy of the LHC, or at higher energy that will need a future collider," she said.

Gianotti recalled that in 2019 and 2020 the LHC will be temporarily stopped in order to carry out work to upgrade the accelerators and transfer it to a higher power level from 13 TeV to 14 TeV.

"In 2021 we will see hopefully very nice physics," she concluded.

The LHC, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, was set up in 2008 with the view of gaining an insight into the mystery of dark matter. It consists of a 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring of superconducting magnets with several accelerating structures increasing the energy of particles.