CERN backs plan for ‘Higgs factory’ and proton-proton accelerator

For the future, the CERN Council wants to focus on an electron positron accelerator. The Council describes this as a ‘Higgs factory’. The next step is an accelerator that can accelerate particles with an energy of one hundred teraelectron volts.

On Friday, the CERN Council released its 2020 update of the European strategy for particle physics, setting out its vision for the future. One of the decisions is that the construction of a new circular accelerator with a length of 100 kilometers will be given priority. In the first phase, this electron-positron accelerator should serve as a ‘Higgs factory’, so that scientists can learn more about the properties of the Higgs boson that scientists discovered in 2012 with the current Large Hadron Collider.

The electron-positron accelerator should be commissioned within ten years of full deployment of the High Luminosity LHC. This High Luminosity LHC is the upgrade of the current LHC, which should do its job between 2026 and 2035 and will remain in operation until 2038. In that year, work is to begin on the 100-kilometer tunnel.

The step after the Higgs factory would then be a proton-proton accelerator. This should be able to accelerate particles in such a way that collisions with an energy level of one hundred teraelectron volts are possible, compared to sixteen TeV of the LHC. According to Scientific American, it is expected that the costs will amount to at least 21 billion euros. CERN must now find support in Europe for the plan to pay for this.

According to Nikhef, the strategy underlines the importance of increasing research activities for advanced accelerator, detector and computing technologies. Nikhef plays an important role in modernizing the LHC experiments.