European leadership in particle physics threatened by China, CERN chief says
‘There is real competition’ from China in particular, Fabiola Gianotti said, adding the giant FCC project is ‘absolutely on the good track’
A giant particle collider project is on “good track”, Europe’s CERN laboratory said on Monday, but warned that without a green light for the financing, China could overtake Europe as the world’s physics leader.
If the project for the Future Circular Collider (FCC) does not move forward, “there is a real risk that Europe loses the leadership in fundamental science in particular in high energy particle physics and the technologies that go with it”, CERN chief Fabiola Gianotti told Agence France-Presse.
“There is real competition” from China in particular, she cautioned, adding that the giant FCC “project is absolutely on the good track” and urging states to release the funding needed to move forward.
CERN, meanwhile, said a detailed analysis revealed no technical obstacles to building the world’s biggest particle collider, even as critics took issue with the “pharaonic” US$17-billion project.
After analysing around 100 different scenarios, CERN on Monday published the results of a years-long feasibility study for its preferred option: a nearly 91-km (56-mile) circular tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border.
With an average depth of 200 metres (660ft), the tunnel would accommodate a particle accelerator that would be more than three times the length of CERN’s existing Large Hadron Collider, currently the largest of its kind.
The LHC – a 27-kilometre proton-smashing ring running about 100 metres below ground – has among other things been used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.