When Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, particle physicists would not have dreamt of asking for something bigger until they got their US$5-billion machine to work. But with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC has fulfilled its original promise - and physicists are beginning to get excited about designing a machine that might one day succeed it: the Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC). "It's only prudent to try to sketch a vision decades into the future" says Michael Peskin, a theoretical physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who presented the VLHC concept to a US government advisory panel on 2 November.
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