Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?

Future colliders are being pitched as the best route to new physics—but the odds hinge on whether nature has been hiding beyond the energy reach of today’s machines. Europe’s proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be a 100-kilometer underground ring near Geneva, designed to collide beams at about 100 TeV—roughly eight times the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) energy—and, in its early phase, to run electron–positron collisions as a “Higgs factory.” The motivation is straightforward: the Standard Model is experimentally complete, yet it still fails to account for neutrino masses, dark matter, and several anomalies, and the long-sought supersymmetry (SUSY) has not shown up despite a decade of LHC searches.

The transcript lays out why colliders keep getting bigger. Early accelerators like linear accelerators and cyclotrons could accelerate particles, but fixed-target collisions waste energy because collision energy grows only with the square root of accelerator energy. Beam colliders solved that by storing particles in rings so two counter-rotating beams can collide, extracting the full impact energy. That path—from small electron–positron machines such as AdA and VEP-1, to proton colliders like CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings, to the Tevatron, and finally to the LHC—culminated in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the last missing Standard Model particle.

Yet the LHC’s success also sharpened the problem. SUSY was expected to address the hierarchy problem by introducing symmetric partners to known particles, with masses in a target range of roughly 100–1000 GeV. The LHC reaches energies above that window, so SUSY should have appeared if it exists in the simplest form. Instead, searches have found no evidence, leaving physicists with an impasse: the Standard Model works, but it offers no clear next step.

The near-term plan is to squeeze more science out of existing infrastructure. The LHC is undergoing upgrades aimed less at jumping to dramatically higher energies and more at increasing luminosity—about a factor of five—via improved superconducting magnets and other component upgrades. The High-Luminosity LHC is scheduled to come online in 2027 after a series of shutdowns.

For truly new territory, the FCC is the flagship proposal. Its electron–positron phase is chosen because such collisions are cleaner and easier to achieve at high luminosity, enabling high-rate Higgs production and precision studies—such as how often the Higgs interacts with the top quark. Later, the FCC would transition to proton–proton collisions to expand discovery reach. The transcript also weighs cost and uncertainty: the FCC is expected to cost tens of billions over its lifetime, and there is no guarantee that new particles exist in the expanded energy range.

The discussion then contrasts Europe’s collider focus with the United States’ strategy. After the Tevatron’s shutdown in 2011, US efforts shifted toward neutrino physics (including DUNE’s planned neutrino source) and toward a smaller but targeted Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences and projected at about 1.6–2.6 billion. The closing point is that fundamental physics investment can pay off indirectly—through long-range technological and societal value—even when immediate returns are hard to quantify.

After the collider segment, the transcript pivots to astrophysics Q&A, addressing how space behaves at the merger of black holes (including the “pair-of-pants” event-horizon shape), what happens when white dwarfs exceed the Chandrasekhar limit (often leading to thermonuclear explosions rather than neutron stars), and why “sound” can exist in space despite low density. The segment ends with a lighthearted note about modern green-screen production.