CERN's Next Giant Leap Is A Machine That Could Unlock The Universe

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) CERN's Large Hadron Collider transformed our understanding of the universe. Now the European Organization for Nuclear Research wants to build something far bigger, and scientists are united behind it. This content was published on May 18, 2026 - 09:00 8 minutes

Originally from Italy, Emiliano has worked as science communicator in various European countries. Now in Switzerland, he writes about scientific discoveries, especially the ones having a chemical bond, and science policy, favoring the stories that have a human touch. His main question: How is academia evolving in a changing society?

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For over 70 years, the CERN research laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva has been the world's foremost temple of particle physics. It is built on collaboration among 25 member states, ten associate member states as well as observers like the US and the European Union (EU). It is also built on the premise that some questions are too big for any one country to answer alone – questions like: what is the universe made of? Why does matter exist at all? What happened in the first instant after the Big Bang?

In 2012, that premise paid off. Scientists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of the Higgs boson – the so-called God particle, which gives mass to fundamental particles, the smallest building blocks of the universe.“Without the Higgs boson, we wouldn't be here,” says Fabiola Gianotti, who led CERN as director-general for ten years until January this year.

The stories in this series look at where the world's largest particle physics laboratory stands in its scientific ambitions and its efforts to remain an international crossroads for understanding our universe.

But the discovery raised as many questions as it answered. And now, with the LHC approaching the limits of what it can reveal, CERN is planning its boldest move yet: a new particle collider nearly four times the size of the LHC, buried 200 metres underground, threading beneath Lake Geneva and the Rhône River. Called the Future Circular Collider, or FCC, it should begin operations in the 2040s and would become the largest scientific instrument ever built – and, its proponents argue, the most important. It is also slated to cost CHF15 billion ($19 billion) to build, and CERN's next big challenge is raising those funds amid challenging geopolitical circumstances.

“The FCC is extremely important for the field, and if anyone can do it, it is CERN,” says Maria Spiropulu, a CERN collaborator who works at the California Institute of Technology.

What the Higgs left behind

“When I give public lectures, I always pick out eight big open questions in particle physics, and always, half of them have something to do with the Higgs boson,” says Mark Thomson, a British physicist who became CERN's new director-general in January. Thomson wants to understand why the 12 known fundamental particles have different masses, and whether the Higgs boson itself should be considered a fundamental particle. These are not questions the current LHC can answer with sufficient precision.

Other physicists are drawn to even more fundamental mysteries. Ben Kilminster, a particle physicist at the University of Zurich, is preoccupied with dark matter.“It's a little bit embarrassing to say that you have a model of all the particles in the universe but you don't know what the remaining 80–85% of the universe is made of,” he says. Then there is the puzzle of why the Big Bang produced more matter than antimatter.

“The FCC can tackle the biggest number of open questions through independent tests,” says Kilminster.

>>“The most extraordinary instrument ever built”? Watch our video about the FCC:

A machine for the next century

The FCC would be, in its first phase, what physicists call a“Higgs factory”: a machine designed to produce many Higgs bosons under precisely controlled conditions. Electrons and positrons would circulate in a new ring 90.7 kilometres in circumference – more than three times the length of the LHC – buried up to 200 metres underground.

“The prime motivation for the FCC is really to explore the Higgs in detail and use it to explore the universe in areas we don't understand,” says Thomson.

In a second phase, potentially operational in the 2070s, the same tunnel would house a proton collider capable of smashing particles together with ten times the energy of the current LHC. This new machine would push current theoretical assumptions to their limits and possibly find new, heavier particles.“You could make particles that have about ten times the mass of current ones,” says Kilminster.

A feasibility study by 1,500 experts and approved by the CERN Council confirmed the scientific case. It reviewed the lab's scientific objectives, the area's geology, and the costs and environmental impacts of a new collider. The European Strategy Group, which is appointed by CERN and gathers some of the continent's most prominent particle physicists, described the FCC as delivering“the world's broadest high-precision particle physics programme, with an outstanding discovery potential.” There is, says Thomson,“an absolute, clear consensus within the particle physics community that FCC is the right way to go.”

“We looked at all the options, and FCC is clearly the scientifically preferred machine to build,” he says.

>> How the financial side of the FCC is proving to be even trickier than the science:

More More Research frontiers Can CERN's $19bn effort to rewrite physics survive a fracturing world?

This content was published on May 18, 2026 The science behind CERN's proposed Future Circular Collider is settled, but the funding is not.

Read more: Can CERN's $19bn effort to rewrite physics survive a fracturing w

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