Sino-Supercollider

Sino-Supercollider

In 2012, the Standard Model changed with the confi rmation of the theorized Higgs boson, the so-called God Particle. Physicists and science lovers around the world rejoiced at this patient discovery from the groundbreaking CERN supercollider in Switzerland—a small piece to an endless puzzle. The question of what to do next inexorably followed. For China, it means building a super collider such as the world has never seen.

Of course, this project is still in the planning stage, but China is going for bigger and better in the extreme. The aim is to make a supercollider that will dwarf CERN’s 27 kilometers, with claims that China’s internationally-collaborated collider will be more than 80 kilometers. What’s more, they plan to do it for less than the cost of the CERN collider. Indeed, there will be two major parts to this Chinese supercollider; the fi rst is the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) which will attempt to smash electrons and anti-electrons together, and the second is a Super Proton Proton Collider (SPPC) which will be looking for new, undiscovered particles. The latter would be, potentially, seven times more powerful than its sister in CERN.

If this project comes to fruition, China would become the undisputed champion of particle physics, drawing scientists from around the globe. There are also plans to make the inner area of the supercollider—which has more than enough space to contain a large city—into a research complex that would make China the premier location for the world’s greatest physicists, something Professor Arkani-Hamed of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study called a possible “scientifi c utopia” in September of 2014.

The submission plans for this science marvel were expected to be submitted in December of 2014, but the conceptual design won’t be ready until 2018, and the facility itself won’t be fi nished until 2028 if all goes according to plan. A lot can go wrong in that time, and plans and an infl ux of cash are no guarantee of success. Without enough support, both domestic and international, China’s grand hopes could go the way of the US’s Superconduction Supercollider in Texas, a planned collider that would have been 87.1 kilometers. Over 14 miles were dug up and 17 shafts were sunk in 1993, but a combination of a cost-wary congress, the end of the Cold War, and poor management harpooned the project, leaving it completely abandoned.

For now at least, China has the will, the money, and the submissive legislature to make this physics paradise into a reality, and the honor of being home to one of the most advantageous scientifi c projects in the history of mankind is certainly a bonus. However, nothing is certain. Government funding has not been secured and a great deal hedges on whether or not China can get the international cooperation it needs. But, at the moment, China’s ambitions for the world’s largest supercollider are growing, not shrinking; indeed, the preliminary plans originally looked for a 52-kilometer particle collider.

For an idea of the size and scale of the ambition of this project, it’s important to take stock of China’s current collider situation. Some may be surprised to learn that China already has a positron collider that, recently updated in 2009, was a colossal achievement of engineering. In fact, it’s in Beijing. It’s 240 meters in circumference and runs at electron and positron energy of just 3.7 giga-electronvolts. When comparing that to the 80-kilometer, 240-giga-electronvolt project in waiting, China has a long road ahead indeed. With the right funding, the right cooperation, the right plan, and the will to see it through, China’s supercollider enthusiasm has the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand the world around us.