2023-04-23 14:50:05
Already equipped with the largest particle accelerator in the world, CERN has launched feasibility studies for an even larger infrastructure: a tunnel with a circumference of 91 km which would pass under Geneva, Lake Geneva and extend to Haute -Savoy.
Environment, seismology, geology… The European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched its first analyzes to build a particle accelerator three times longer than the current installation which will come to an end in 2040.
If it sees the light of day, the Futur Circulaire Collisionneur (FCC) will form, under the Franco-Swiss border, a circular tunnel 91 km long and about 5 meters in diameter, between 100 and 300 meters underground. Its route would pass under Geneva, Lake Geneva and extend to the vicinity of Annecy.
Eight locations could accommodate technical and scientific surface sites, including five in Haute-Savoie, two in Ain and one in Geneva, explained Antoine Mayoux, engineer at Cern, during a press visit.
After a phase of theoretical analysis, “we are now embarking on field activities for the first time” to analyze environmental issues. Geophysical, seismic and geotechnical studies will follow.
Once this vast feasibility study has been carried out, the 23 Member States of CERN will decide around 2028/2029 on the construction of this installation which should accelerate electrons and positrons until 2060, then hadrons until 2090.
With the aim of answering many fundamental physics questions that remain unanswered, while 95% of the mass and energy of the universe are unknown to us. Enough to go further in the exploration of dark matter, antimatter, the Big Bang, until the creation of the universe.
“It’s essential to continue to explore this fundamental physics, to continue to understand the primordial state, of what we are made of and where we are going”judges the Deputy Director of Accelerators and Technology at Cern, Malika Meddahi.
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CERN plans to build a larger particle accelerator
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CERN already has the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a ring 27 km in circumference located about a hundred meters underground.
“The problem with accelerators is that at some point, no matter how much data we accumulate, we arrive at a wall of systematic errors. Around 2040-2045, we will have removed the substantial marrow of the precision that the ‘we can get LHC’explained Patrick Janot, physicist at Cern.
But some researchers fear that this huge project will gobble up funds that could be used for other, less abstract physics research. The feasibility study is already estimated at 100 million euros. Its results are expected in 2025.
Eventually, the impact will be the same as if we built another city next to Geneva with 700,000 inhabitants.
Jean-Bernard Billeter, author of a report for the Noé21 associationin France 3 Alps
Other physicists warn that if fundamental physics is stopped, applied physics will also be affected decades later. “The benefits of our research are extremely important”emphasizes Malika Meddahi, citing medical imaging and the fight against tumors.
However, the project raises concerns on the part of certain associations campaigning for the protection of the environment. The Geneva organization Noé21 wonders in particular about the energy consumption of the infrastructure.
“Ultimately, the impact will be the same as if we built another city next to Geneva with 700,000 inhabitants”assures Jean-Bernard Billeter, retired engineer and author of a report on the impact of the project for Noé21. “There is something to be surprised about. It is absolutely incompatible with the declared policy, the Paris agreements.”
CERN claims, for its part, to rely on the ERC principle: avoid, reduce and compensate. The stated objective is to achieve carbon neutrality of the FCC by 2050.
“The day we invented the electron gun, it was the beginning of accelerators, we didn’t know it was going to give rise to television. The day we found general relativity, we didn’t know it was going to be used to operate the GPS”adds Patrick Janot.
Asked by AFP, Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge, admitted that the FCC is expensive but “we have to keep in mind that it will be built by a vast international collaboration working together over a very long period of time”.
More than 600 institutes and universities around the world use CERN’s facilities, and are responsible for financing, carrying out and operating the experiments in which they collaborate.
However, CERN is not the only laboratory to have entered the race, China having announced in 2015 that it intended to begin the construction of the largest particle accelerator in the world before 2025.
“Here at CERN, we have more than 60 years of experience in developing and building these infrastructures with partners from all over the world. This guarantees, together with the political stability that we have in the center of Europe, to minimize the risks” geopolitics, argued to AFP the head of the FCC feasibility study, Michael Benedikt.
While the Chinese project has not yet emerged from the ground, Malika Meddahi highlights the leading position of Europeans in the field: “China displays the same ambition. Let’s be vigilant and be sure that we are not on the eve of a change in this hierarchy”.
With AFP
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