New giant particle collider 'right option for science', says incoming CERN chief

The next head of Europe's CERN physics laboratory said Thursday that he favoured moving forward with plans for a giant particle collider that would dwarf the facility that discovered the famous "God particle".

"Scientifically, I am convinced it is the right option," Mark Thomson, whom CERN has tapped to be its next director-general, said of preliminary plans for the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

It is "the right option for CERN, the right option for science", the British physicist said during an online press conference a day after CERN said he would be taking the helm for a five-year term starting in January 2026.

"Absolutely I wish to pursue that route," he said.

The CERN lab, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, seeks to unravel what the universe is made of and how it works.

Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – a 27-kilometre (17-mile) proton-smashing ring running about 100 metres (330 feet) below ground – has among other things been used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson – dubbed the God particle -- which broadened the understanding of how particles acquire mass.

The LHC is expected to have fully run its course by around 2040, and CERN is considering building a far larger collider to allow scientists to keep pushing the envelope.

A feasibility study is under way for the 91-kilometre FCC, which CERN estimated earlier this year will cost around $17 billion.

Thomson, currently the executive chair of Britain's Science and Technology Facilities Council and an experimental particle physics professor at Cambridge University, hailed the efforts to fully grasp the costs involved, saying that a final decision was still several years off.

"There is time to build a very, very strong consensus around the project based on the clear scientific argument" for it, he said.

At CERN, Thomson will replace Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, who a decade ago was chosen as the first woman to lead the lab. She has also expressed support for the FCC project.