Professor Tim Gershon, Elementary Particle Physics Group, University of Warwick, said: “The discovery of the Higgs boson with CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012 provides us with a new way to look at the Universe on the smallest scales. Studies since then have allowed important progress in fundamental physics, but it has become clear that to get the most knowledge we will need a new facility to produce and study Higgs bosons.

“The so-called Future Circular Collider (FCC) is CERN's proposal to address this challenge. It will provide the ability to measure the properties of the Higgs boson in unprecedented precision, and in so doing to look at the Universe in new ways. It is hoped that this will provide answers to some of the most important fundamental questions about the Universe, such what happened in its earliest moments. The latest report on the ongoing FCC feasibility studies is encouraging - in the most optimistic scenario the new collider could start to produce data in just over two decades from now. But there is still a very long way to go.”