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CERN's $17B supercollider in question as top funder criticizes cost

Germany has raised doubts about the affordability of the Large Hadron Collider’s planned successor.

But Lilienthal’s announcement came as a surprise to some researchers, says Jenny List, a particle physicist at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, who presented possible alternatives to the FCC-ee at the Bonn workshop. “There is general agreement in the community that the next large machine should be a Higgs factory, and CERN is the only lab in the world currently willing to put money on the table toward this goal,” says Michael Peskin, a theoretical physics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. “Certainly we have to look at other potential sources of funding, and we do.” But others point out that the lab’s annual budget of 1.4 billion Swiss francs already has to cover the ongoing operations of the LHC, as well as an upgraded version of it due to fire up later this decade.

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