The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world – but, not for long.

Scientists are now discussing plans for the machine that will one day replace the LHC, and they say it will be seven times stronger, and three times the size.

As the LHC took nearly 30 years to bring to life, it’s expected that the development of its successor will likewise take decades to complete.

And, when finished, it will crash high-energy particle beams into each other with the power of roughly 10 million lightning strikes.

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The Large Hadron Collider (pictured) is the biggest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world – but, not for long. Scientists are now discussing plans for the machine that will one day replace the LHC, and they say it will be seven times stronger, and three times the size

CERN'S LARGE HADRON COLLIDER The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 17- mile ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. Nobody knows what the facility might reveal with its collisions, which are mini-versions of the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Advertisement

Hundreds of scientists met in Germany this week in an event organized by the Future Circular Collider (FCC) Study to discuss plans for the next LHC, Horizon Magazine reports.

The LHC recently started back up after its annual ‘winter break,’ during which a longer-than-usual pause allowed technicians to replace the superconducting magnet and install a new ‘beam dump.’

It will continue to operate until the mid-2020s, when it will likely need a 10-year upgrade that will boost the collision rate, according to Horizon.

Scientists with the four-year study EuroCirCol are looking into the technology that will pave the way for the LHC’s successor.

Not only will the machine be larger, but it will be equipped with double strength magnets for more powerful collisions.

This could ultimately help to solve many of the universe’s unanswered mysteries, including dark matter.

‘When you look into things like the movement of galaxies, we see that we can only understand and explain about 5 percent of what we observe,’ Professor Michael Benedikt, leader of the FCC, told Horizon Magazine.

‘But with questions like the so-called problem of dark matter, which is linked to the fact that galaxies and stars are not moving as you would expect them to, the only explanation we have is that there must be matter we do not see which distorts the movement accordingly.’

Scientists with the four-year study EuroCirCol are looking into the technology that will pave the way for the LHC’s successor. The proposed site of the Future Circular Collider is pictured

The LHC is known for detecting the Higgs Boson, an elusive particle predicted by the Standard Model, which helps to explain how the universe got its mass.

But, it has also helped in cancer treatment and medical imaging.

The next generation machine could lead to even more substantial breakthroughs in physics and medicine, as well as other fields.

Researchers are now testing a prototype of the advanced cryogenic beam vacuum system, according to Horizon.

As the LHC took nearly 30 years to bring to life, it’s expected that the development of its successor will likewise take decades to complete. And, when finished, it will crash high-energy particle beams into each other with the power of roughly 10 million lightning strikes

The plan will require enormous amounts of international cooperation and funding, and will take decades to bring to life.

At the start of this month, the LHC started up again after 17 weeks inactive.

Maintenance work began in December 2016, marking the beginning of the LHC’s extended ‘technical stop.’

Since completed, each of the machines in the chain have been turned back on and checked, one by one, ahead of the switching on of the final component – the LHC.

SUBATOMIC PHYSICS, IN BRIEF Atoms are usually made of protons, neutrons and electrons. These are made of even smaller elementary particles. Elementary particles, also known as fundamental particles, are the smallest particles we know to exist. They are subdivided into two groups, the first being fermions, which are said to be the particles that make up matter. The second are bosons, the force particles that hold the others together. Within the group of fermions are subatomic particles known as quarks. When quarks combine in threes, they form compound particles known as baryons. Protons are probably the best-known baryons. Sometimes, quarks interact with corresponding anti-particles (such as anti-quarks), which have the same mass but opposite charges. When this happens, they form mesons. Mesons often turn up in the decay of heavy man-made particles, such as those in particle accelerators, nuclear reactors and cosmic rays. Mesons, baryons, and other kinds of particles that take part in interactions like these are called hadrons. Advertisement

‘It’s like an orchestra, everything has to be timed and working very nicely together,’ said Rende Steerenberg, who leads the operations group responsible for the whole accelerator complex, including the LHC.

‘Once each of the parts is working properly, that’s when the beam goes in, in phases from one machine to the next all the way up to the LHC.’

Along with replacing a superconducting magnet at the LHC, and installing a new beam dump in the Super Proton Synchrotron, the CERN team also conducted a massive cable removal campaign.

These upgrade will push the collider to a higher luminosity, allowing researchers to gather more data.