Mark Thomson, the new head of Europe’s physics laboratory CERN, voiced confidence Tuesday about raising the billions of dollars needed to build by far the world’s biggest particle accelerator.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, seeks to unravel what the universe is made of and how it works.

The planned Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be an electron-positron collider ring with a circumference of 91 kilometers and an average depth of 200 meters.