New CERN chief pledges to forge ahead with $17-billion supercollider

British particle physicist Mark Thomson has been named as the next leader of CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland.
As CERN’s director-general, Thomson will face major challenges, including an uncertain political landscape amid the war in Ukraine, which has led the lab to break government-level ties with Russia. He will also have to repair a faltering consensus around the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a proposed 90-kilometre tunnel that will host the lab’s flagship experiments throughout the rest of the century, and could cost US$17 billion in its first phase. The German government, CERN’s largest financial contributor, expressed scepticism about FCC earlier this year, and China could beat CERN to the punch with a similar project.
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Thomson is no stranger to CERN: he worked at a major experiment there in the 1990s, and, together with the current director-general Fabiola Gianotti, helped to discover the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — in 2012. He is currently chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, a UK funding agency, and is a representative on the CERN Council, the board that oversees the lab on behalf of its member countries. Thomson will take up the director-general post when Gianotti’s second consecutive five-year term ends at the end of 2025.
In a press conference on 7 November, both Gianotti and Thomson stressed the need for continuity, and the importance of the ongoing upgrade to the 27-kilometre LHC. Thomson also reiterated Gianotti’s commitment to building the FCC. “I am very much aligned with the vision of the current DG,” he told reporters.
Former CERN council president Ursula Bassler is optimistic about Thomson’s appointment. “He is a person who values what the FCC can bring to CERN, but who is also aware of the reservations some people might have,” says Bassler, a particle physicist at École Polytechnique in Paris. “I think he will really act in a quite transparent way to come to a decision.”
Thomson will be the first UK physicist to lead the organization since the 1990s. As well as having worked at the LHC, he has been a co-leader of and spokesperson for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, now under construction in Illinois and South Dakota.