Europe is developing a new collider for China
Almaty. September 22. Silkroadnews – Europe develops a new collider for China, Bloomberg reported.
“CERN, the European nuclear physics research organization, is contemplating the development of a particle accelerator three times larger than the Large Hadron Collider that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a move intended to match growing Chinese ambitions in particle physics,” report reads.
According to CERN’s director general Fabiola Gianotti, design studies have already begun to create a new circular super-collider which length to be between 90 to 100 kilometers. At the same time, the length of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, currently the world’s most powerful energy particle accelerator, measures 27 kilometers.
“Chinese scientists would like to build an electron-positron circular collider twice the size of the LHC, which smashes protons together. After building this initial accelerator, China would eventually expand it into an even bigger proton collider. But initial plans to start construction in 2021 suffered a setback when the Chinese government opted not to fund the collider in its 2016 five-year plan. The research team will now to need to wait until 2020 to apply again,” the report says.
According to the publication, last year Chinese-born U.S. citizen and Nobel laureate in physics Chen Ning Yang said that China, as a still developing country, could not afford a project that is expected to cost $6 billion at its initial stage.
Nevertheless, F. Gianotti supported the idea of creating a collider in China.
“It is very good to have different regions of the world that are interested in fundamental physics and consider that the outstanding questions today in particle physics are worth building the next generation particle collider,” the agency quoted her saying.
The Large Hadron Collider is known for finding the Higgs boson in 2012, which has become one of the most important discoveries in particle physics for many decades. The particle helps explain how the visible universe holds together.
