While the LHC gets ready for run 2 at 13 TeV, Europe sows the seeds of a next generation high-energy physics research infrastructure: The European Circular Energy-Frontier Collider (EuroCirCol) project started on June 1st, 2015.
EuroCirCol is a conceptual design study for a post-LHC research infrastructure based on an energy-frontier 100 TeV circular hadron collider. It was selected for funding within the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme. With a total score of 15 out of a maximum of 15 it received the highest evaluation score of all submitted proposals.
The study will receive 3 M€ funding from the European Union. It brings together an international consortium of 16 beneficiary partner organizations including universities and research centres. EuroCirCol is coordinated by CERN and will run for 4 years.
The objective of this visionary project is to develop the conceptual design of a future energy frontier hadron collider infrastructure as an international, collaborative effort under European leadership. A new research infrastructure of such scale depends on the feasibility of key technologies pushed beyond the current state of the art. Innovative designs for accelerator magnets to achieve high-quality fields up to 16 T and for a cryogenic beam vacuum system to cope with unprecedented synchrotron light power are amongst the many challenges that will be addressed. Advanced energy efficiency, reliability and cost effectiveness are additional key factors to build and operate such an accelerator within realistic time scale and cost.
EuroCirCol is part of the global Future Circular Collider (FCC) study, federating resources worldwide to assess the merits of different future accelerator scenarios. FCC forms the core of a globally coordinated strategy of converging activities in a very important research area, involving participants from the European Research Area and beyond.
The ALBA Synchrotron role in this project is to contribute in several of the tasks set up in the proposal, specifically, in the management tasks with its broad experience in managing accelerator developments and organising international events and in the vacuum design using its expertise in vacuum system under high thermal load caused by synchrotron radiation. In this last task, a PhD student position has been opened at ALBA that will realize his thesis work in close collaboration with CERN experts.
Attendees at the EuroCirCol meeting at CERN on June 2-4 pose outside the main building.
