FCC Physics Opportunities: Future Circular Collider Conceptual Design Report Volume 1

We review the physics opportunities of the Future Circular Collider, covering its $e^+e^−$, pp, ep and heavy ion programmes. We describe the measurement capabilities of each FCC component, addressing the study of electroweak, Higgs and strong interactions, the top quark and flavour, as well as phenomena beyond the Standard Model. We highlight the synergy and complementarity of the different colliders, which will contribute to a uniquely coherent and ambitious research programme, providing an unmatchable combination of precision and sensitivity to new physics.This volume of the Conceptual Design Report is dedicated to an overview of the FCC physics potential. It focuses on the most significant targets of the potential FCC research programme but, for the sake of space, not covering a large body of science that will nevertheless be accessible (and which is documented in various other reports, listed in the Appendix). The studies presented here, in addition to setting plausible targets for the FCC achievements, have helped in making the choice of the colliders’ parameters (energy, luminosity) and their operation plans. Furthermore, these studies contributed to the deinition of the critical detector features and parameters, as described in Volumes 2 and 3 of the CDR. While at first discussing the targets of each collider separately, the second part of this volume puts their synergy and complementarity in perspective, underscoring the added benefit to science brought by the unity and coherence of the whole programme. In addition to summarising the outcome of the work done during this CDR phase of the FCC physics studies, for the benefit of the whole particle physics community, this document is intended to stimulate an expert discussion of the FCC physics potential, in the context of the forthcoming review of the European Strategy for Particle Physics