Various news about a possible future collider, all pointing to the CERN FCC-ee as the leading proposal.
- For up to date background technical information on proposed colliders, including cost estimates, see here.
- The Chinese CEPC plan is now on hold, as a decision was reached to not include it in China’s plans for the next five years (2026-30).
- As part of the European Strategy for Particle Physics update process, recommendations drafted earlier this month have now been released (see here and here). As expected, the main recommendation is to pursue the FCC-ee project, which will cost an estimated \$18 billion dollars or so. The fall-back recommendation in case this is too expensive is rather odd. People were expecting such a fall-back to be some sort of linear collider, which would cost half as much. Instead the fall-back recommendation was for essentially the same FCC-ee project, saving just 15% with various cuts to its capabilities. There’s a reaction to this from the linear collider people here.
- CERN today announced that private donors have pledged \$1 billion towards the FCC-ee project.
CERN will not make a final decision on this until 2028. I’ve always been skeptical that there is a viable financial path to funding a \$15 – \$20 billion new collider. Perhaps in our new world order where everything is controlled by trillionaire tech bros, the financing won’t be a problem.
Dr. Woit,
In light of this specific path chosen by the Europeans, what are your current, personal thoughts on the muon collider proposal for the U.S.? It doesn’t seem like the funding environment will be favorable to one until 2027 (after the midterm legislative reshuffle) at the earliest, and, even though it was slightly before my time, I’m still a little cautious from the story of the SCSC attempt. Personally, the muon approach seems to be the kind of ‘outside-the-box’ thinking we need, and I know a few people out my way who are pushing for it and doing good work on it, but my work is also in computational astrophysics, so I’m not close enough to it to trust my judgement.
Jesse Lee Buffaloe,
The muon collider proposal is a very different story, since there the problem is that there’s challenging new technology that needs to be developed. This requires funding, but at a much more modest scale than building a 100km tunnel. The whole science funding situation in the US is currently so bizarre that it’s hard to guess whether the needed research might be funded here. For the tech bros, this would be pocket change, maybe one of them will fund it…