CERN: The next 50 years

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from CERN is a 14 TeV proton-proton collider that is at the cutting edge of technology, and is a heartening sign of both the public's support for basic science in Europe and beyond, and the determination of European countries to stay at the forefront of particle physics. Realization of this project started some 50 years ago. Now for the next 50 years, particle phycists not only at CERN are planning a new generation of experiments that will push the high-energy boundary back even further. At CERN, a high-energy electron-positron linear collider, such as the 3-5 TeV Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) project is being considered. At Fermilab, focus is on a Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) that would take physicists into the 200 TeV region. These two possibilities could be among the long-term goals of the global accelerator network, which would keep the world's particle physicists busy until 2050.