China has recently announced its intention of building the world’s largest supercollider. It is expected to be, upon completion, seven times more powerful and at least twice as large as the CERN one in Switzerland. It is to be the latest attempt to build a machine which will further help science to explain the universe to itself.
The initial design project for the Chinese supercollider has cost, so far, around $6 billion. With the designs nearly complete, the Chinese state that they plan on construction of the particle accelerator to begin in 2021. The Chinese claim that they would be able to produce Higgs bosons in the millions which would be far in excess of what is currently being produced by the particle accelerator at CERN. The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 at CERN.
China’s Institute of High Energy Physics will be in charge of the project. The Institute already oversees China’s Neutrino Dectector Daya Bay and Beijing’s Electron Collider. The Chinese physicists, however, want to build a machine with enormous power, one that will do things that the CERN machine is incapable of.
The director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Wang Yifang, said that, “We have completed the initial conceptual design and organized international peer review recently, and the final conceptual design will be completed by the end of 2016.”
Most physicists seem to agree that they need to find out more with regard to the types of matter that really make up the universe. As of now, they say, only about 4.5% of the known universe, for them, is composed of ordinary matter. The rest, they now speculate, is composed of dark energy and dark matter but, again, it seems to be all a speculation for them.
Physicists, it seems, want to come to a new version of physics, one that will overcome the current Standard Model. For instance, the Standard Model doesn’t explain the existence of gravity for them or recognize certain observations that physicists believe have shown them dark matter.
The current Standard Model also doesn’t explain to scientists why matter emerged victorious over anti-matter when the universe began.
PHOTO CREDIT: NBC News