56-mile particle smasher, planned to replace Large Hadron Collider, expected to cost $16B
Top minds at the world's largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could vastly improve research into the remaining enigmas of physics, per the AP . The plans for the Future Circular Collider—a nearly 56.5-mile loop along the French-Swiss border and below Lake Geneva—published late Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The FCC would carry out high-precision experiments in the mid-2040s to study "known physics" in greater detail, then enter a second phase—planned for 2070—that would conduct high-energy collisions of protons and heavy ions that would "open the door to the unknown," said Giorgio Chiarelli of Italy's National Institute of Nuclear…