Project
Portuguese Participation in the Future Circular Collider (FCC)

Code 2024.05140.CERN

Beneficiary Entity

LIP - Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2024.05140.CERN

Project summary

The 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics was a hugely important milestone to define future directions in particle physics. The proposal of a Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN is one such promising direction towards a world-level facility for the exploration of this field. An FCC Feasibility Study has been on-going since 2021, concerning all aspects towards the constructions of FCC, from geologic and environmental considerations to the physics case and detector concepts. This process will culminate in the FCC Feasibility Study Report, to be released in 2025, followed by a European Strategy Group update and a CERN council decision on the 2027 timescale. As we approach that decisive moment, this proposal aims to consolidate theoretical and experimental efforts of the Portuguese participation in the international FCC Collaboration, which formally began in 2021.The FCC project will have two phases. The first will consist of an e+e- collider to be built in a 100 km tunnel to be constructed in the Geneva region, making use of the infrastructure and conditions already in place at CERN. The energy of this collider will be staggered to include running periods at the Z pole mass, W-pair, ZH and top-quark pair production thresholds. This collider is expected to run for around 15 years and be replaced in the same tunnel by an hadronic machine, FCC-hh, with collision energy of around 100 TeV. FCC-hh, will vastly extend the energy scale which may be probed at the LHC. The FCC-ee period will allow the development of the essential technology for this accelerator, especially the high-field superconducting magnets that do not exist today. This scheme will repeat the virtuous cycle achieved with LEP and the LHC, spreading the large cost of fixed structures over several decades and building the world-leading collider facility for particle physics for the foreseeable future.In 2024 official Detector R&D (DRD) collaborations have been set up towards the development of the technology needed to conceive and realise the future detectors. The aim is to identify the relevant state-of-the-art instrumentation that better enhances the physics potential of long term experiments, such as those to be installed at the FCC. For the precise measurements of the FCC-ee collider, the detectors must have high granularity for high energy and position detection resolution, which implies an unprecedentedly large number of electronic readout channels. FCC-hh experiments will face occupancies, readout rates and radiation levels never before attained at colliders, and precision timing and radiation tolerance will be crucial.PPatFCC will support our participation in the DRD6 Collaboration for Calorimetry. We plan to contribute to this front with R&D on novel, radiationhard scintillating plastic materials for light-based calorimeters, with the medium-term goal of producing prototypes. Optical instrumentation of calorimeters is a topic of long-term expertise at LIP, and where we already have dedicated facilities at the Laboratory of Optics and Scintillating Materials (LOMaC). The detector hardware line will be complemented with simulation studies on the performance of currently proposed design options for scintillator-based hadronic calorimeters, framed within the ALLEGRO detector concept for the FCC-ee.Owing to the very clean experimental setup of the FCC-ee machine designed with the aim of delivering high integrated luminosities, as well as very small systematic errors, we will have the possibility to study the SM with unprecedented precision. As an example, the precision on the extraction of electroweak observables at the Z-pole will surpass the results of LEP by a factor of 20-100. Moreover, the planned staged run at the ZH threshold will allow us to pin down the Higgs boson couplings to vector bosons and fermions and the Higgs self-coupling with an improved precision between a factor of 2-10 with respect to the HL-LHC, which may reveal indications of physics beyond the SM.For these quantum effects to be measurable, however, the precision of theoretical calculations of the various observables within the SM will have to match that of the experiment, i.e., to improve by up to two orders of magnitude with respect to current achievements. In order to match the projected experimental precision at the FCC, the existing Monte Carlo event generators will have to be significantly improved, to include presently unknown missing multi-loop higher-order corrections of electroweak and QCD origin. In PPatFCC we aim to tackle this challenge, targeting some of the currently limiting factors on the theory side for the future physics analyses at the FCC.In addition to the scientific goals outlined above, this project is also intended as a way to continue building up a Portuguese particle physics community for the FCC endeavour, an effort which formally began with the previous FCT project (reference CERN/FIS-PAR/0035/2021).

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Support under

Reforçar a investigação, o desenvolvimento tecnológico e a inovação

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