China’s electron positron accelerator has a high construction cost but could help thousands of scientists make new discoveries for decades to come.
Eliezer Rabinovici, professor emeritus of physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and president of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), said Chinese scientists can build the largest particle accelerator on Earth. . Currently, CERN operates the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located in an annular tunnel with a circumference of 27 km below the border between Switzerland and France. The circular electron positron accelerator (CEPC) that China plans to build will far exceed the LHC with a circumference of 100 km, according to Interesting Engineering.
The Chinese government has not yet approved the project, which is controversial in the country’s scientific community. Physicist and Nobel scholar Yang Chen-ning is the most vocal opponent of CEPC. Currently living in Beijing, Yang once questioned the need to build a super particle accelerator. He said that China has more urgent problems to solve such as economic development and environmental protection.
Rabinovici shared that he read what Yang said and the reactions of Chinese scientists at that time, but he thought they were underestimating the country’s potential. During his visit in April, Rabinovici witnessed the enormous progress of Chinese science. CERN is considering expanding the LHC to a machine nearly 100 km long, and Rabinovici was invited by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing to share his thoughts on the project.
The question of whether China should build the world’s largest particle accelerator has been controversial for nearly a decade. Wang Yifang, director of IHEP, first proposed the idea of building CEPC in 2012 after the Higgs boson (the God Particle that gives mass to nearly every other particle) was discovered in Europe by the LHC. By accelerating electrons and antiparticles, positrons, to extremely high energies and causing them to collide with each other, the new infrastructure will create millions of Higgs bosons, allowing scientists to make many new discoveries beyond The standard model, the best hypothesis today to describe the basic building blocks of the universe.
An anonymous physicist at China’s top university shared that the research team directed by Wang included many outstanding scientists. Over the past decade, their research has been highly regarded by international physicists and the CEPC project they designed is attracting much attention globally. He also disagreed with Yang’s argument that investing in such a large project would reduce budgets for urgent social issues and some other scientific fields. According to him, China does not lack funding for large-scale projects.
Wang recently admitted that the amount of more than 5 billion USD to build CEPC is not cheap. But he emphasized that if CEPC can support the work of thousands of scientists for decades to come, the average cost will not be so high. According to Wang, construction of a super particle accelerator in China could begin within the next three years, although licenses and funding from the government still need to be obtained.