Atom-smasher : Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator in Switzerland have submitted proposals for a new, much larger, supercollider - Its aim is to discover new particles that would revolutionise physics.

Its aim is to discover new particles that would revolutionise physics and lead to a more complete understanding of how the Universe works.

If approved, it will be three times larger than the current giant machine.

But its £17b price tag has raised some eyebrows, with one critic describing the expenditure as "Reckless".

That money - which is only the initial construction cost - would come from member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) including the UK, and some experts have questioned whether it makes economic sense.

The biggest achievement of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was the detection of a new particle called the Higgs Boson in 2012.

But since then its ambition to track down two holy grails of physics - dark matter and dark energy - have proved elusive and some researchers believe there are cheaper options.

The new machine is called the Future Circular Collider (FCC). Cern's director general, Prof Fabiola Gianotti, told BBC News that, if approved, it will be a "Beautiful machine".

"It is a tool that will allow humanity to make enormous steps forwards in answering questions in fundamental physics about our knowledge of the Universe. And to do that we need a more powerful instrument to address these questions," she said.

Cern is located on the border of Switzerland and France, near Geneva.

The LHC consists of an underground circular tunnel 27km in circumference. It accelerates the inside of atoms (hadrons) both clockwise and anticlockwise to speeds close to the speed of light and at certain points crashes them together harder than any other atom-smasher in the world can.

The smaller, sub-atomic particles left over from the collisions help scientists work out what atoms are made of and how they interact with each other.

Building on a revolutionary discovery

The supercollider's detection of the Higgs Boson particle more than 10 years ago was ground-breaking.

The existence of a building block that gives all other particles in the Universe their form was predicted in 1964 by the Scottish physicist, Peter Higgs, but was only discovered at the LHC in 2012.

It was the final piece of the jigsaw of the current theory of sub-atomic physics, which is called the Standard Model.

The proposal is for the larger FCC to be built in two stages. The first will begin operating in the mid 2040s and will collide electrons together. It is hoped the increased energy will produce large numbers of Higgs particles for scientists to study in detail.

The second phase will begin in the 2070s and require more powerful magnets, so advanced that they have not yet been invented. Instead of electrons, heavier protons will be used in the search for brand new particles.

The FCC will be nearly three times the circumference of the LHC, a whopping 91km and twice as deep. It has to be deeper to prevent the stronger radiation created by the higher energies from reaching the surface.

Original Story By | By Pallab Ghosh & Kate Stephens