How will the LHC's successor operate compared to LHC?

  Credit: Polar media, CERN

As we know, LHC is a 27 km long, circular tunnel that is a particle collider and is used to research about sub-atomic particles. It is the largest particle accelerator we have ever built and had made some very big discoveries, like the Higgs boson's discovery which was a pretty big deal.

 Credit: Polar media, CERN 

LHC operates by colliding protons with each other at near light speed and when the collision happens a lot can be studied from the aftermath of that collision as we can detect new particles, like some very heavy particles, like Top Quarks which decay instantaneously and probably cannot be found in nature, these particles are studied so to learn more about the universe and the quantum world. 

What LHC was made for was colliding electrons and positrons (Anti-Electron) at first, which was know as LEP at first, for the study of Z-boson, but later it was converted to Large Hadron collider.

Credit: CERN

Now LHC has been able to make some pretty staggering and exciting discoveries over the past decades, but now CERN is developing designs of bigger and more powerful particle collider, named Future Circular Collider (FCC), which will be about 100km in length and 30km in diameter, which is pretty huge, and approximately 4 times the size of LHC. FCC will be built to boost research which is currently being conducted in LHC, who knows what we will discover with the FCC, maybe more about quarks or what are quarks made of or even proof for string theory, but that's just speculations who knows what is there, but besides that FCC will be large upgrade and will allow for far more greater discoveries.

Currently, the LHC operates at 13 TeV of collision energy, whereas the FCC is aimed at reaching 100TeV of collision energy, the FCC will not only be used for colliding hadrons, it will also be used as an electron-positron collider and also a proton-electron collider. Not only that, the FCC marks to look for dark energy and maybe even dark matter research.

Credit: CERN

The LHC uses huge superconducting magnets and other such magnets to accelerate a beam of particles to near speed of light with strong magnetic fields, the FCC will also operate the same way but at much bigger and powerful scales, 16-Tesla dipoles would be necessary to steer a beam at 50TeV over 100km, which will be double the strength of LHC and with that superconducting radiofrequency cavities to provide each beam up to 50MW to counter the energy loss, as beams lose energy when moving in a circular path, now that's not it, the magnets and other instruments and detectors need to be operated at very low temperatures, LHC cools its cable windings to 1.8K with a distribution of os liquid helium, the FCC is no different, although due to new advancements in RF cavities and other such things, they would be able to operate at high temperatures, which will cut down the power consumption liquefication of gases is a power-intensive task, FCC will operate from 4.5 K to 1.8 K.

Now, this does not come cheap, CERN has proposed $20 billion for construction, for this FCC has faced quite a bit of criticism, but maybe that cost is for the better and new discoveries in physics, but the criticism is also reasonable as the questions physicists have, FCC will only be able to answer a small part of it, but FCC will also let us stress test our current knowledge of laws of physics and also answer some questions related to Higgs boson and other such burning questions.

FCC is not the only particle accelerator planned for the future, ILC, International Linear Collider is another collider that is planned if it receives support from the Japanese government. The ILC constitutes of two linear particle accelerators about 20km in length each, colliding electron and positron 7000 times per second to produce an array of new particles for study.

Credit: Polar media, CERN