China is planning to build an enormous particle accelerator twice the size and seven times as powerful as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, according to state media reports. According to China Daily, the new facility will be capable of producing millions of Higgs boson particles - a great deal more than the Large Hadron Collider which originally discovered the ‘God particle’ back in 2012.
"We have completed the initial conceptual design and organized international peer review recently, and the final conceptual design will be completed by the end of 2016," Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily in an exclusive interview.
The institute has been operating major high-energy physics projects in China, such as the Beijing Electron Positron Collider and the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino experiment. Now scientists are proposing a more ambitious new accelerator with seven times the energy level of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. The first phase of the project's construction is scheduled to begin between 2020 and 2025.
“So far the Standard Model seems to explain matter, but we know there has to be something beyond the Standard Model,” said Denise Caldwell, director of the Physics Division of the National Science Foundation. “This potential new physics can only be uncovered with more data that will come with the next LHC run.”
The US has nothing even remotely comparible to the LHC and the proposed Chinese facility. What happened? To read more, click here.