CERN Okays Ambitious $23bn 62-mile Super-Collider Project: Where Will it Get Funds Though?

In order to build the new 62-mile super collider, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (commonly known as CERN) the organization would need to rake up at least $23.5 billion. 

According to SlashGear, the new collider that will be built in an underground tunnel near CERN Geneva will not just help physicists understand Higgs boson properties, but this contraption will also collide electrons with their antimatter positrons.

But before anything else, two main issues will have to be resolved with the first and foremost being whether the designs that the experts will soon come up with will be feasible or not.

And the second issue to tackle will be identifying their primary source of funding as it is not yet in place. 

Although the process will not start before 2038, the existing funds from its 23 member countries will not be enough to cover the costs and must try to rope in countries that have largely contributed to the field of physics such as the U.S. and Japan.  

These member countries are the following: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. 

In the meantime, construction is still taking place on the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, which is essentially just an upgrade to the existing LHC. 

Read Also: Possible New Particle Discovery At CERN

The World Doesn't Need Another Particle Collider

At least not now. This is from the opinion of Sabine Hossenfelder who is not only an author and theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity, but also a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. 

In her opinion written at Scientific American, she mentioned at the very first sentence that the potential rewards for building another particle collider are unclear and that the money would be better spent on researching emerging threats such as climate change and new viruses. 

She also highlighted that the declining relevance of the collider saying that when physicists started building colliders in the 1940s, they did not have a complete inventory of elementary particles, and they knew it.

"New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in 2012, the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the Future Cadron Collider could test." she added. 

As of now, she is calling particle physicists to develop new technologies that could bring colliders back in a reasonable price range and hold off digging more tunnels.

"The most promising technology on the horizon is a new type of "wake field" acceleration that could dramatically decrease the distance necessary to speed up particles, and hence shrink the size of colliders." she emphasized. 

However, the plan is not universally approved in the physics community. Scientists have said that it is a high-risk, high-reward scenario with little guarantee of getting a return on investment according to a report from The Independent. 

Read Also: CERN Antimatter Research: Unleashing 'Hell On Earth'?

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