Ask Ethan: Could we build a collider bigger than Earth? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Aug, 2024

The largest particle accelerator and collider ever built is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Why not go much, much bigger?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest, most powerful particle accelerator ever built on Earth. Accelerating protons up to energies of ~7 TeV apiece — to energies about 7000 times greater than their rest-mass energy as given by E=mc² — it smashes protons circulating clockwise with protons circulating counterclockwise into one another at specific collision points, where giant detectors then measure the debris emerging from those collisions and attempt to reconstruct them in an effort to probe fundamental physics. After announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, it continues to probe the subatomic universe to the highest precisions of all-time.

But in order to push the frontiers of physics even further, a new, more powerful machine will be required: a future particle collider. Although there are four main concepts currently being considered, there are many who ultimately hope for a particle accelerator the size of Earth, or even greater. That’s what Gary Camp has been thinking about, as he writes in to ask:

“Since bigger is better (so far) I am toying with the idea of a collider…