Revealed plans for huge particle collider in China

Scientists released this week a report on the design of a new generation particle accelerator in China, which would serve as a "Higgs boson factory," as its proponents have called it.

In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson particle, which earned François Englert and Peter Higgs the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. A new-generation collider would make many of these Higgs bosons to understand the properties. particles and help scientists determine the future direction of particle physics. But some have pointed out that simply taking the accelerator could be ignoring the human rights violations committed by the Chinese government and the political climate of the country.

Physicists use particle accelerators to understand the components of matter. Sending subatomic particles almost at the speed of light, then breaking them together transforms all that energy into mass and produces visible particles from the collider's detectors. These high energies could potentially recreate some of the conditions that prevailed right after the Big Bang and answer questions about the particles that make up the universe, the force of gravity and tons of other things.

The largest current collider is the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which destroys protons and has a circumference of 16.6 miles. But scientists have already begun planning their successors. CERN is modernizing the LHC and is planning to create a "future circular collider", which could have a circumference of 62 miles.

Today, the consortium of scientists representing the Circular Positron Electronics Collider (CEPC) has published a report detailing the proposed collider. This one would also be housed in a circular tunnel of one hundred kilometers (62 miles) on one of three potential sites. The documents work by assuming that the collider will be located near Qinhuangdao City, about 200 miles east of Beijing. This would cause electrons to collide with their antimatter partners, called positrons (each particle has an antimatter partner of the same mass and electric charge, among other differences). This would serve to generate "over a million Higgs particles," as well as billions of another particle called the Z boson and 15 million pairs of W bosons.

This would allow scientists to accurately measure these particles, which could direct physicists to the kind of experiments they should be doing. This is consistent with the goals of other future particle colliders proposed, such as the International Linear Collider that would live in Japan.

The tunnel is also large enough to accommodate a proton accelerator in the future, to complete high-energy proton collisions like the LHC, but on a larger scale. The tunnel could also serve as a synchrotron, another type of particle accelerator that generates bright light to use for tasks such as microscopy.

At least one scientist we spoke to wrote about this topic said he was concerned about the project. Yangyang Cheng, researcher emeritus of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab and post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University, told Gizmodo that she applauded the efforts of the young scientists who wrote the report, as well as international collaboration. physics.

Cheng was concerned about both the effects of the experience and the safety of the construction project. She said the Chinese government had displaced 9,000 villagers to build the FAST telescope and that security problems had been encountered in building its high-speed rail network. But on top of that, the country has recently abolished the limitation of the presidential term and is registering numerous human rights violations.

"It's a 21st century totalitarian police state with 21st century surveillance technology, with more than one million Uyghur Muslims and ethnic minorities in concentration camps," Cheng told Gizmodo. "The situation should be a major factor for any entity doing business with China."

This is not to ignore other governments that sponsor violence, and China has led the way in some scientific disciplines, including quantum physics. But Cheng asked that scientists around the world simply do not allow the machine to be built and use it without exercising their political power to help solve the country's problems. "International scientists have the power and the power," which they can use without being complicit. She also said that Chinese scientists should be more aware of their potential complicity.

Gizmodo has contacted representatives of the Collider, CERN and US Fermilab for comments, and will update the message as soon as we receive a response.

According to the report, research and development of the experiment will take place from 2018 to 2022 and Chinese funding agencies are interested in financing large scientific projects. The construction would then take place from 2022 to 2030. After 10 years of operation, the upgrade to a proton collider would begin. In total, the project proposal provides for a cost of less than 6 billion Swiss francs, or about $ 5.92 billion – and mentions that building in China would lead to cost savings.

Meanwhile, we have planned our own accelerators for the United States, such as the electron-ion collider, but nothing to the size of the CEPC.