LHC marches on; China plans to build a bigger one (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 23, 2018, 19:36 (2193 days ago) @ David Turell

Here's the Story:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07492-w?utm_source=briefing-dy&utm_mediu...

"Physicists at Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) are are designing the world's biggest particle smasher. If built, the 100-kilometre-circumference facility would dwarf the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland — and would cost around half the price.

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"The CEPC will produce Higgs bosons by smashing together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. Because these are fundamental particles, their collisions are cleaner and easier to decipher than the LHC’s proton–proton collisions, so once the Chinese facility opens, in about 2030, it will allow physicists to study the mysterious particle and its decay in exquisite detail.

"Last week, IHEP published a milestone report outlining the blueprint for the collider. Initial funding for research and development has come from the Chinese government, but the design is the work of an international collaboration of physicists and the team hopes to garner funding from around the world. (Researchers behind a long-planned rival ‘Higgs factory’ known as the International Linear Collider expect to learn by the end of this year whether Japan will stump up the cash to host it.)

"The blueprints reveal that the Chinese collider would run in a circle 100 metres underground, at a location yet to be decided, and host two detectors. At the end of its ten-year lifespan, the electron–positron machine could be upgraded to collide protons at energies seven times those of the LHC at its peak. Ahead of the report’s publication, Nature spoke to Wang about the project.

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"It has not significantly changed, because international participation is still limited by the financial commitment of the international partners. They are all interested, but they need to get endorsement from their funding agencies. They are waiting to hear the Chinese government’s position on whether to fund it, and that decision depends on the outcome of the R&D. But CERN is working on a new European strategy for particle physics, so we hope that this time the CEPC can be included. A similar process will happen in the United States, probably in the next year or 2020. We hope it will be included in both.

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"The spallation neutron source in Dongguan is now operating. It is small but good enough. IHEP is also planning a 1.4-kilometre-circumference light source to be built in Huairou, northern Beijing, at a cost of 4.8 billion yuan. This is a circular electron accelerator that can generate synchrotron radiation — X-rays with extremely high intensity. These are useful for almost every research discipline, including materials science, chemistry, biology, environmental science, geology and medicine. We believe the government is going to give its final approval for the project by the beginning of next year, and then we can start construction. We think it would be a world-leading machine. Most light sources are upgrades from existing machines, so they are limited. We can use the best configurations, the best technologies, without constraints."

Comment: this is good news. The LHC is near the end of its limits. I certainly man y not see the new results, but they are needed. We only have a few answers so far.