China Has Plans for the World’s Largest Particle Collider
China wants to build a next-generation particle collider that would be cheaper and more powerful than Europe’s planned successor to the Large Hadron Collider
China hopes to build a US$5-billion particle smasher within three years — beating Europe’s proposed mega-collider to the punch. The 100-kilometre Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) would aim to measure the Higgs boson — a mysterious particle that gives everything mass — in exquisite detail. Such information could answer fundamental questions about how the Universe evolved and why particles interact in the way that they do.
Next year, the proposal for the CEPC will go before the Chinese government for possible inclusion in its next five-year plan. If it can win government support, construction could begin in 2027 and would take around a decade, according to a comprehensive technical-design report published on 3 June. The report estimates that the supersized collider would cost 36.4 billion yuan (US$5.2 billion), which would make it considerably cheaper to build and run than Europe’s US$17 billion Future Circular Collider (FCC). Construction on the European facility will begin in the 2030s if it receives government approval.
Inside its enormous underground tunnel, the CEPC would smash together electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, at extraordinarily high energies to generate millions of Higgs bosons. The sheer number of them would allow researchers to study the particle in greater detail than ever before, says Andrew Cohen, a theoretical physicist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. By measuring the Higgs more precisely, researchers will be able to probe questions that reach beyond the Standard Model — the leading but incomplete theory of what the cosmos is made of — such as the nature of dark matter and why there is more ordinary matter than antimatter in the Universe.
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