The FCC-ee is a next generation circular collider proposed for the post-LHC era at CERN. Its principal motivation is to study the properties of the Higgs boson, the prospects for which I shall briefly review. However, FCC-ee will also have the capability of operating at very high luminosity on, and around, the Z pole, and will allow a data sample to be collected five orders of magnitude larger than that accumulated at LEP. I shall present the exciting and powerful physics case for such a programme, with emphasis on the improvements in systematic control with respect to LEP that are required to exploit fully this huge data set. It is concluded that the ability of the FCC-ee to operate as a Z factory adds enormous value to the physics potential of the FCC project.
Guy Wilkinson is experimental high-energy physicist working at the University of Oxford. He is an expert in flavour physics, electroweak physics and detectors used for particle identification. Guy has serv ed as the spokesperson of the LHCb experiment at CERN. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.