The Future Circular Collider: a Summary for the US 2021 Snowmass Process

TL;DR

The paper discusses the proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) project, highlighting its potential to advance fundamental physics through high-energy collisions, precision measurements, and searches for new particles, including dark matter, in a multi-stage collider setup.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary and update on the FCC project, detailing its design, physics program, and the novel scientific opportunities it offers beyond current collider capabilities.

Findings

FCC-ee enables sub-percent Higgs coupling measurements

Potential to discover new particles up to 7-50 TeV scales

Proton-proton stage reaches 50 TeV for new physics searches

Abstract

In this white paper for the 2021 Snowmass process, we give a description of the proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) project and its physics program. The paper summarizes and updates the discussion submitted to the European Strategy on Particle Physics. After construction of an approximately 90 km tunnel, an electron-positron collider based on established technologies allows world-record instantaneous luminosities at center-of-mass energies from the Z resonance up to tt thresholds, enabling a rich set of fundamental measurements including Higgs couplings determinations at the sub percent level, precision tests of the weak and strong forces, and searches for new particles, including dark matter, both directly and via virtual corrections or mixing. Among other possibilities, the FCC-ee will be able to (i) indirectly discover new particles coupling to the Higgs and/or electroweak bosons up to scales around 7 and 50 TeV, respectively; (ii) perform competitive SUSY tests at the loop level in regions not accessible at the LHC; (iii) study heavy-flavor and tau physics in ultra-rare decays beyond the LHC reach, and (iv) achieve the best potential in direct collider searches for dark matter, sterile neutrinos, and axion-like particles with masses up to around 90 GeV. The tunnel can then be reused for a proton-proton collider, establishing record center-of-mass collision energy, allowing unprecedented reach for direct searches for new particles up to the around 50 TeV scale, and a diverse program of measurements of the Standard Model and Higgs boson, including a precision measurement of the Higgs self-coupling, and conclusively testing weakly-interacting massive particle scenarios of thermal relic dark matter.