CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the frontier of high-energy physics. From a report: The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan’s approval by an independent panel in March. Europe’s preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least $23.5 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab’s famed Large Hadron Collider. The new machine would collide electrons with their antimatter partners, positrons, by the middle of the century. The design — to be built in an underground tunnel near CERN’s location in Geneva, Switzerland — will enable physicists to study the properties of the Higgs boson and, later, to host an even more powerful machine that will collide protons and last well into the second half of the century. The approval is not yet a final go-ahead. But it means CERN can now put substantial effort into designing a collider and researching its feasibility, while pushing to the backburner research and development efforts for alternative designs for LHC follow-ups, such as a linear eletron-positron collider or one that would accelerate muons. “I think it’s a historic day for CERN and particle physics, in Europe and beyond,” CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti told the council after the vote.
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