Particle colliders use a huge amount of energy, so physicists are evaluating proposed successors to the Large Hadron Collider to optimise efficiency and reduce their climate impact
Physics 2 September 2025
By Alex Wilkins
An artist’s impression of the proposed Future Circular Collider at CERN
Polar Media/CERN
Physicists planning to build the successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have started looking at the climate impact of a massive particle smasher, with plans to make it as energy efficient as possible.
The LHC discovered the Higgs boson, a particle that gives mass to all the others. Now particle physicists want to study it in more detail with a new kind of collider, known as a Higgs factory, to produce large numbers of the particle by smashing …
