By BlueShift | 2026-02-05

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has raised $1 billion in funds from private donors to build what will be the world's biggest particle accelerator, expressing confidence it will be able to raise the rest.

If it goes ahead, the European initiative is expected to replace a rival Chinese project that has been put on ice.

The total cost for the gigantic Future Circular Collider (FCC) -- an electron-positron collider ring with a circumference of 91km and an average depth of 200 meters -- is expected to run around $19.5 billion, AFP reported.

CERN, based near Geneva, Switzerland, seeks to unravel what the universe is made of and how it works. The organization has 25 member states, and its council is set to take a decision in 2028 on whether to go ahead with the FCC.

Scientists believe that ordinary matter -- such as stars, gases, dust, planets and everything on them -- accounts for just 5% of the universe.

The FCC will try to reveal what makes up the other 95%, the so-called dark matter and dark energy that scientists have yet to observe directly.

"That project would start operation in the second half of the 2040s," said CERN head Mark Thomson, who took over as director-general on January 1.

About half of the FCC's total cost "comes out of the existing ongoing budget, and we have to find the resources for the other half," he said. "I'm very optimistic personally, but it's not going to be straightforward."

In December, in a first for the laboratory, private individuals and philanthropic foundations pledged $1 billion towards the construction of the FCC.

Donors include the Breakthrough Prize Foundation of Silicon Valley investor Yuri Milner; the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation; Italian Agnelli family heir John Elkann, and French telecoms tycoon Xavier Niel.

"They're not expecting anything in return. This is really for the good of science," Thomson said.

'The God particle'

For now, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's biggest particle accelerator.

The 27km proton-smashing ring has been used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, dubbed "the God particle."

A fundamental particle discovered at CERN in 2012, Higgs boson confirms the existence of an energy field permeating the universe that gives mass to elementary particles like quarks and electrons (the Higgs field).

As a massive, spin-zero boson, it validates the Standard Model of particle physics.

The discovery broadened science's understanding of how particles acquire mass and earned Peter Higgs and Francois Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics.

The LHC is expected to undergo upgrades later this year, including more powerful focusing magnets and new optics, becoming the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), AFP reported.

It is expected to have fully run its course by around 2040.

If the CERN council approves the plans, construction on the FCC's initial stage, the FCC electron-positron machine (FCC-ee) would begin in 2030, Physics World reported.

The FCC-ee would focus on creating a million Higgs particles to allow physicists to study its properties with an accuracy an order of magnitude better that possible with the LHC, according to Physics World.

It would start operations in 2047, after the HL-LHC closes down, and run for about 15 years, with a second machine, the FCC-hh beginning operation in the 2070s and running for around 25 years, according to CERN.

FCC-hh machine, for hadron-hadron collisions, would smash protons together at high energy with the aim of creating new particles.

China's stalled particle accelerator

A decade ago, China announced its intention to build the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), which was to have been the world's largest particle accelerator.

But Beijing recently put the project on ice -- which CERN's then director-general Fabiola Gianotti regarded as an opportunity to push forward with the FCC.

"The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which filters projects, has decided to give the green light to a smaller, lower-energy collider, rather than the larger CEPC, which is in direct competition with CERN," Gianotti said in December.

In China, Wang Yifang, head of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, confirmed the CEPC was not included in the next five-year plan, which runs from 2026 to 2030.

"We plan to submit CEPC for consideration again in 2030, unless FCC is officially approved before then, in which case we will seek to join FCC, and give up CEPC," he said.

Particle theorist John Ellis of Kings College London told Physics World that China’s decision to effectively put the CEPC on the back burner "certainly simplifies the FCC discussion."

But he said he would welcome China’s participation in the FCC, noting that Chinese "accelerator and detector [technical design reviews] show that they could bring a lot to the table, if the political obstacles can be overcome."