CERN prepares its long-term future

Geneva, 6 February 2014. Particle physics takes the long-term view. Originally conceived in the 1980s, the LHC took another 25 years to come into being. This accelerator, which is unlike any other, is just at the start of a programme which is expected to run for another 20 years. Even now, as consolidation work aimed at a restart in 2015 continues, detailed plans are being hatched for a large-scale upgrade to increase luminosity and thereby exploit the LHC to its full potential. The HL (High Luminosity) LHC is CERN 's number-one priority and will increase the number of collisions accumulated in the experiments by a factor of ten from 2024 onwards. Even though the LHC programme is already well defined for the next two decades, the time has come to look even further ahead, so CERN is now initiating an exploratory study for a future long-term project centred on a new-generation circular collider with a circumference of 80 to 100 kilometres.