FCC and oPAC: shaping the future of particle accelerators
The world is gearing up for the biggest physics experiment ever and oPAC is playing a crucial role in it. An international collaboration of 63 institutions from 24 countries has already started to design the potential successor of the LHC: the Future Circular Collider (FCC).
The LHC is currently the largest scientific facility ever built. With a circumference of 27 km, it used particle beams colliding at 7 – 8 TeV to discover the Higgs boson, one of the biggest scientific achievements of our generation.
The FCC has been proposed as a 100 km tunnel to collide protons at energies of over 100 TeV. With this increased energy scientists hope to shed light on some of the greatest mysteries of modern science like the nature of ‘dark matter’ or the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe.
The LHC took over 25 years to conceive and build, that is why planning for its successor must start now. The FCC new accelerator poses a huge technological challenge that can only be addressed in a coordinated international effort involving the best of both research and industry.
oPAC fellows have been hard at work pushing the limits of technology beyond the current state-of-the-art to meet the demands of the next generation of accelerators. For example, radiation monitors able to operate in cryogenic environments down to 2 Kelvin have been developed for the first time by Marcin Bartosik (CERN) in collaboration with oPAC partner CIVIDEC. Konstantin Kruchinin (Royal Holloway University of London) in turn has been investigating novel non-invasive methods for measuring the transversal profile of the particle beam without destroying it, a key requirement in modern accelerators. Héctor García Morales (Royal Holloway University of London) has designed and tested novel collimation techniques for the LHC, in order to optimise the signal to noise ratio in future experiments. On the other hand Emilia Cruz Alaniz (University of Liverpool) has specialised in simulations of the beam dynamics, minimising the size of the beam at the interaction region in order to increase the probability of the collisions in the upgrades to the LHC.
The FCC study is supported by the European Union through the European Circular Energy-Frontier Collider – EuroCirCol project. The project has received 3 M€ of funding within the Horizon 2020 program to produce a conceptual design study for a 100 TeV circular hadron collider by 2019. EuroCirCol is coordinated by CERN and brings together an international consortium of 16 beneficiary organisations, including oPAC partners ALBA and the University of Liverpool.