The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Europe’s particle physics centre CERN is the largest and one of the most successful scientific instruments ever built. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the LHC resulted in the award of a Nobel Prize to the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and in the ensuing years the machine has produced an astonishing wealth of new data about the mechanisms which shaped the very early universe. It is likely that these investigations will continue for several more decades. Nevertheless, we are now at a cross-roads on the journey to selecting our next big particle collider project, the successor to the LHC , but we are probably not quite ready to make such a momentous decision. How did we get to this point and why is it proving to be so difficult to resolve this matter?
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