The Higgs boson machine — CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — is barely five years old, and yet the international collaboration of physicists is already planning its successor. Dubbed the Very Large Hadron Collider (points for creativity), the new collider will be around 60 miles long (four times longer than the LHC), and smash protons together with a collision energy of 100 teraelectronvolts (14 times the LHC’s current energy). While the LHC’s discovery of the Higgs boson was a watershed moment, its existence poses more questions than it answers — and those answers probably can’t be answered by the LHC. Thus, to keep high-energy physics moving forward, it’s time to discuss its successor.

The Large Hadron Collider, which occupies a 17-mile-long (27km) loop near Geneva in Switzerland, was built between 1998 and 2008 with the primary purpose of proving or disproving the existence of the Higgs boson. The LHC cost around $6 billion to build, has a max collision power of 14 TeV (but has currently only operated at 7 TeV), and is expected to remain in operation until ~2035. As you probably know, the LHC found a particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson last year. This discovery suggests that particles do indeed gain their mass by interacting with a pervasive, ubiquitous Higgs field.

The discovery of a very heavy Higgs, though (about 135 times heavier than a proton), poses a new set of questions that the LHC may not be able to answer. One distinct possibility is that the Higgs boson gains its heaviness through supersymmetry — a theory that proposes that there’s a second, “superpartner” particle coupled to each and every Higgs boson. We have not yet observed any of these superpartners — and to discover them, a stronger collider may be necessary. It is hoped that, when the LHC powers up to 14 TeV at the end of 2014, we will discover some signs of supersymmetry, which will then help inform the development of the LHC’s successor.

There are actually two groups currently proposing a successor to the LHC. Back in November, Michael Peskin of the SLAC accelerator in California presented an early VLHC concept to the US government. Last week, CERN itself convened the Future Circular Collider study. Both groups are looking to build the same thing, though: an 80-100km (50-62mi) circular accelerator, with a collision energy of around 100 TeV. As the VLHC name implies, we’re essentially talking about the same basic build and functionality as the LHC — just with longer tunnels and stronger magnets (probably up to 20 tesla). The expected cost for either collider (only one of them is likely to be built) is around $10 billion.

It is still very early days for both groups — but when you’re talking about excavating a tunnel that’s 60 miles long, it makes sense to do a lot of homework before you begin the build. The first draft specification for the VLHC isn’t likely to come before we get the next round of results from LHC — which probably won’t be until 2015. CERN says that if it builds the successor, excavation will probably begin in the 2020s, so that it’s completed before the LHC is retired in ~2035.

In the shorter term, the International Linear Collider, which will smash electrons together instead of protons to investigate dark energy and multiple dimensions, will be completed around 2026. The future of high-energy physics is bright indeed. I have a feeling that, over the next 20 years or so, the universe is going to be forced to cough up some very juicy secrets indeed.