|
by Nick Carne
November 19, 2018
from
CosmosMagazine Website
China's new facility will be larger than
the Large Hadron Collider.
xenotar/Getty Images
The
biggest particle collider in the world
moves one step
closer to reality.
China's plans to develop a next-generation particle collider have
moved into a new phase with the release of a Conceptual Design
Report (CDR).
Speaking recently to an international audience at a workshop in
Beijing, the chair of the International Committee for Future
Accelerators, Geoffrey Taylor from Australia's University of
Melbourne, described it as,
"a significant
milestone along the road to such an important facility for
fundamental physics".
Construction of the
Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC)
is expected to start in 2022 and be completed in 2030.
"The CDR signifies
that we have completed the basic design of the accelerator,
detector and civil engineering for the whole project," says Gao
Yuanning, chair of the CEPC Institutional Board.
"Now our next step
will focus on the R&D of key technologies and prototypes for the
CEPC."
The entire report is
publicly available:
The new supercollider is
expected to complement and go beyond the physics of the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in
Switzerland.
It is considered an
important part of the global plan for high-energy physics research
and will support a comprehensive research program by scientists
around the world.
Chinese scientists proposed the facility in September 2012, just two
months after the discovery of
the Higgs boson at the LHC.
The CEPC will be housed in an underground tunnel with a
100-kilometre circumference, and has been described as a "Higgs
factory".
A planned second stage
will incorporate what has been termed a Super Proton-Proton
Collider,
"focused on new
physics beyond the Standard Model".
| 
