FCC-ee Higgs and Electroweak Factory - Design Progress and Outlook

Although, with the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model of particle physics has been all but completed, numerous important questions of fundamental physics remain yet unanswered, longing for novel high energy physics experiments at higher intensities and energies. With a circumference of approximately 91 km the Future Circular electron-positron Collider, FCC-ee, is being designed to enable high energy physics experiments from the Z-pole up to above the top-pair-threshold, corresponding to center-of-mass energies from 91.2 to 365 GeV. Thanks to its flexibility, the FCC-ee would allow performing diverse lepton collision experiments at unprecedented precision, spanning over a wide parameter range. The FCC-ee combines state-of-the-art accelerator technologies with novel concepts while incorporating the experience from 60 years of lepton storage rings and collider physics. Its design is currently being shaped to exceed past and current production rates of heavy elementary particles (Z, W, H, t, b, tau, ...) by at least one order of magnitude at all operation stages. Therefore, the FCC-ee has unique potential of being the world-leading facility for accelerator science and high energy physics over the next decades. With a possible project approval date in 2028, first particle collisions could occur in the mid 2040s. This talk will review the FCC-ee accelerator design and related technology R&D, following the FCC Feasibility Study "mid-term review" by the CERN Council in early 2024.