Future Circular Colliders

Abstract

After 10 years of physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle physics landscape has greatly evolved. Today, a staged Future Circular Collider (FCC), consisting of a luminosity-frontier highest-energy electron–positron collider (FCC-ee) followed by an energy-frontier hadron collider (FCC-hh), promises the most far-reaching physics program for the post-LHC era. FCC-ee will be a precision instrument used to study the Z, W, Higgs, and top particles, and will offer unprecedented sensitivity to signs of new physics. Most of the FCC-ee infrastructure could be reused for FCC-hh, which will provide proton–proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 100 TeV and could directly produce new particles with masses of up to several tens of TeV. This collider will also measure the Higgs self-coupling and explore the dynamics of electroweak symmetry breaking. Thermal dark matter candidates will be either discovered or conclusively ruled out by FCC-hh. Heavy-ion and electron–proton collisions (FCC-eh) will further contribute to the breadth of the overall FCC program. The integrated FCC infrastructure will serve the particle physics community through the end of the twenty-first century. This review combines key contents from the first three volumes of the FCC Conceptual Design Report.