The Future

In subatomic physics, people have a long-term vision. The projects at the LHC are the culmination of decades of drawings, thought and construction. It is therefore hardly surprising that people are already thinking about the future, the era after the LHC. What can we improve and how can we push back the boundaries even further?

It should not be forgotten that technology continues to develop apace. The drawings assume techniques not yet available but which are expected to emerge over the coming years. Should a situation arise where no suitable materials or tools are available, then these will just simply have to be developed!

These rapid developments, driven by the applications in the accelerators and detectors can also be found elsewhere: equipment that constituted an entire detector 20 years ago is now just a small part of the latest detectors, and various technologies that were initially developed for particle physics have since acquired a worldwide and broader application. Take, for example, the World Wide Web…

Physicists are currently considering improvements to the LHC, and possible successors to the LHC and various other experiments that can potentially be performed in the field of astroparticle physics.

International Linear Collider
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is being planned as the successor to the Large Hadron Collider recently commissioned at CERN. This ILC shall more accurately observe the collisions being studied with the LHC. The high energies of the LHC might yield interesting new insights, which can subsequently be examined in greater detail with an advanced linear accelerator. This is similar to, for instance, first seeking a few interesting parts of a plant using a simple microscope and subsequently studying these with a very powerful microscope. Although you already know what is interesting, you still have to determine its exact structure.