China plans to build world’s first super collider b4in.org/r6Wj A group of Chinese physicists, working with international collaborators, have announced their plans of building a 52-kilometre underground particle accelerator that would smash together electrons and positrons to unravel the fundamental building blocks of life. The project would offer means of probing these sort of fundamental questions that are unavailable to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, an oval-shaped 26km underground tunnel where the famous Higgs boson was confirmed. Physicists say that the proposed US$3-billion machine is within technological grasp and could be ready by 2028. More importantly, however, the upcoming particle accelerator will become the first stepping stone for a much grander and ambitious project – a super collider. The super collider that never was European and US teams have both shown interest in building their own super collider, but the huge amount of research needed before such a machine could be built means that the earliest date either can aim for is 2035. In fact, the US planned a building something like this in 1993 – the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) or Desertron, as it was nicknamed, in Texas. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometres (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 TeV per proton or 40 TeV collision energy. This would have made it eight times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but Congress eventually canceled the project after it contested its utility and $2 billion had already been spent. Now, China is inclined to make this giant leap which will put the country at the very forefront of particle physics, according to the announcement made by the country’s Institute of High Energy Physics. The country wants to work towards a more immediate goal than a super collider by 2035, however, and in the meantime it plans on building an electron-positron collider, which should allow the Higgs boson to be studied with greater precision than at the much smaller Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. More b4in.org/r6Wj
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 13:20:30 +0000
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