Nearly one year ago CERN announced that the Higgs boson had been experimentally observed. The discovery was one of biggest scientific confirmations seen in decades and was one of the major goals in mind when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was created.

Now, with engineers working hard to get the LHC back up and running for 2015, CERN has announced that it is looking even further into the future when it comes to its supercollider technology.

CERN today announced that it has launched a study into a future supercollider even more spectacular than the LHC. The study will be called the Future Circular Colliders (FCC) program and will research the feasibility of a new hadron collider. This new supercollider could be 80 to 100 kilometers in circumference – far larger than the 27 kilometer in circumference LHC. It might also reach energies close to 100 TeV, dwarfing the LHC’s current 14 TeV capabilities.

“We still know very little about the Higgs boson, and our search for dark matter and supersymmetry continues,” said Sergio Bertolucci, director for Research and Computing at CERN. “The forthcoming results from the LHC will be crucial in showing us which research paths to follow in the future and what will be the most suitable type of accelerator to answer the new questions that will soon be asked.”

In the meantime, CERN is already formulating plans for increasing the luminosity of the current LHC. The so-called High Luminosity LHC will be completed by 2024 and, according to CERN, will increase the number of collisions possible in experiments by a factor of ten.

Image via CERN