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China Plans Particle Colliders That Would Dwarf CERN's LHC
ananyo (2519492) writes Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, working with international collaborators, are planning to build a "Higgs factory" by 2028 — a 52-kilometer underground ring that would smash together electrons and positrons. Collisions of these fundamental particles would allow the Higgs boson to be studied with greater precision than at the much smaller (27 km) Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists say that the proposed US$3-billion machine is within technological grasp and is considered conservative in scope and cost. But China hopes that it would also be a stepping stone to a next-generation collider — a super proton-proton collider — in the same tunnel. The machine would be a big leap for China. The country's biggest current collider is just 240 meters in circumference.
So I said, "Super-collider? I just met her!" [audience laughs] And then they built the super collider. - Humorbot 5.0
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Yup, you might even call it a Big Leap Forward.
I'll go fetch my coat, thanks.
Cern had how many set backs while trying to power the thing up in the early stages of testing? With all the corruption China has I wonder how this will compare.
Eventually they're going to dig all the way to America to make a Super Duper Whopper collider!
For all the downside of the one-party system and semi-centrally planned economy, sometimes I am jealous that China can just move forward with things like this. Environmentalist cry about a rare species becoming extinct? Screw them. A few thousand people displaced? Deal with it. If something is in the nation interest, it gets done.
This sounds like a make-work project by the Chinese government to try to boost their economy. Construction is a huge business in China that accounts for a large portion of their GDP - that's why you see things like the "ghost cities" there, where construction workers built thousands of apartments and offices that aren't ever going to be used simply because the Chinese government needs to keep pumping money into construction.
Digging a 57-kilometer underground tunnel would probably put plenty of construction workers to work for a while - not to mention hauling in all the equipment, doing all the wiring and piping, etc.
Now if only they could find a source of cheap, expendable workers to mine the tunnel...
The estimated replacement cost for the Tappan Zee bridge in NY is about $4B. A small bridge was replaced near me at a cost of over $100M. It seems like something of this magnitude will cost a lot more than $3B.... or it's an incredible scientific bargain at this price.
This is starting to get close to the Superconducting Super-Collider size. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The problem with Chinese subatomic particles is that one half-life later you are ready for more.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Sounds cool. But, given China's perpensity to have massive earthquakes, is the building of such a large collider a wise idea? I would think a 57 mile diameter ring of superconducting, supercooled magnets and high vacuum might have some integrity and alignment issues even after a minor tremor let alone a large quake.
What in theory could physicists do if they could make stupid-big colliders, like the circumference of the Earth or the solar system?
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It has our gratitude.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Those are circumferences, not diameters.
Fair enough, it's a big tunnel, but the first iteration is only set to run at about 1/60th of the energy of the LHC according to the site. The super-proton upgrade *does* look interesting though.
I didn't expect to read the phrase "much smaller" referring to the Cern LHC for quite a while.
I wonder how much of this has to do with fundamental research and how much has to do with high energy physisists and governments wanting to be able to say that theirs is bigger than someone else's.
So will it be known as the Very Large Hadron Collider?
Or the Even Larger Hadron Collider?
The LHC created a higgs boson by colliding protons. This Chinese collider is planned (according to TFS) to collide electons and positrons. IANAPP but I am not sure that would create a higgs boson. However colliding an electon and a positron would create energy )matter and antimatter) probably in the form of gamma rays.
Whereas colliding protons and antiprotons will give of some energy in the form of neutrinos
In fact electrons and positrons are Leptons, so wouldn't this be called a Large Lepton Collider (LLC)?
This is a pretty small upgrade from the LEP that used to be in the current LCH tunnel. That went up to 209 GeV and ruled out Higgs masses up to 115 GeV. The Higgs is around 125 Gev, or 9% higher, and the energy of this is supposed to be 240 GeV, or 15% higher.
That makes me wonder if the planned energy is enough for a useful Higgs factory. The ILC is supposed to do 500 GeV and would work well as a Higgs factory. That proposal would be more than twice as expensive though.
It's of course possible the article has it wrong and it's really 240 GeV per beam, adding up to 480.
The origin of the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe is something that people try to solve using the standard model and indications that charge-parity symmetry breaking occurs in some interactions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Much larger collides could explore this beyond leptons as well as ideas beyond the standard model such as supersymmetry and string theory and their connection with vacuum energy.
As soon as people stop wanting power & control?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Or the markets will soon be invaded by cheap made-in-China Higgs bosons. Although swiss-made Higgs are known to be by far more precise and accurate, the cheap chinese bosons will send CERN factory into bankrupt, unless some kind of duty is introduced to slow down foreign particles.
You've been hiding under a rock for forty years if you don't know what those white flags on the Brooklyn bridge mean.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I accept that China is now a leader in science and technology. I wish them the best on this project and I am sure it will yield fantastic science. I just hope by "international collaborators" they mean more than the Russian Federation. As an American, I hope we get in on the action.
Just one thing though: if you are going to go to the trouble to build such a big and expensive machine, why not build a linear collider? I realize it would take more land, but I'm sure they have it and the science would be even better. Correct me if I am wrong, but after the second refit of the LHC, isn't the next big international European science project going to be a big honking linear collider? At that point, it won't matter that China's collider is bigger, you can get more interesting results from a gigantic linear collider. Although the idea of a super-proton collider does tickle me a bit.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
In reality, the Chinese project is definitely not make-work if they plan to do actual research.
True but a circular design for a electron-positron collider is far from the most efficient. At the energies needed to create the Higgs the energy loss caused by bending the electrons around in a ring means that the ring has to be far longer in circumference than a 'one-shot' linear collider would need to be. Worse if we find something even more exciting like Supersymmetry in our next run of the LHC starting this coming March you will never be able to increase the energy of a circular e-p machine to study it whereas with a linear collider you can extend it.
A circular machine only makes sense with heavier particles like protons but I question whether the cost savings of a single tunnel for both an e-p machine and a future proton machine will outweigh the massive increase in the cost of the magnets and accelerating cavities for the e-p machine.
Just what we need. From the people who brought you the Yutu moon rover...
They have hundreds of millions of single men which they need to keep employed.
Good thing the US is mortgaging its future to keep China together today.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I thought the power of these things were measured in TeV...
Serious question to any engineers who know how to build these devices: is the diameter/length of the accelerator relevant to the performance or just to the cost?
Their economy, although growing, cannot continue its current direction and will eventually spiral down to where military spending cripples the rest of the economy; just as the USSR's economy did. Let's enjoy their limelight basking while we can, LOL.
The President of the US will proudly announce the Free Education Market, in which all American children unable to afford a Million Dollar College Tuition common among even State Colleges on their own must apply for and accept a College Scholarship Loan from an approved provider in the National Marketplace. All recipients of these scholarships will agree to work for a salary reduced by up to 90% until the cost of the Scholarship is paid back plus interest of up to 20%. All Children who do not obtain a Scholarship from the Free Market will be barred from employment. The White House has hailed this a critical step in returning America to the forefront of the Science and Technology.
LEP operated around 209 GeV in 27Km so this Chinese proposal of 240 GeV at 52Km is.. underwhelming. Realize things like labor cost less in China but this isn't a high rise they are making. LHC cost amost $5B to build. Where is China getting the magnets? I'm not sure US export controls will allow a sale. And then there are those pesky detectors which are technological marvels themselves.
Still unfortunate that we can't scale up anti-proton production to levels necessary for high luminosity.
Cern had how many set backs while trying to power the thing up in the early stages of testing? With all the corruption China has I wonder how this will compare.
Of course CERN had problems - this is not engineering, but science. The big difference between the two being that you call it engineering, when you know in advance how to do, and science when you don't. No doubt, the first time a simple van-der-Graf accellerator was built, they had to overcome a number of problems; now, it is something you'd let a student do, because all the technical problems have been ironed out. And when/if China builds this new cyclotron, they will run into a large number of technical problems; of course they will. No need to start constructing fables about "all the corruption"; all that says is that you are suffering from petty envy.
this will work out about as well as China's high speed bullet trains... China is too isolated, this kind of engineering can not be accomplished w/o real international cooperation on all levels.
They won't have to travel out of the country to steal technology; the world will bring it to them.
Can they stir fry in that thing?
This story is giving me a hadron.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Even assuming China has the technical expertise to create that custom component
China almost certainly has a labor force can make the gear or can hire people who can if there are specific skills needed.
does it pass even casual scrutiny to think that China can make a collider of twice the size at one-third the cost?
No. I'm a cost accountant and I can assure you that China will not enjoy any meaningful cost advantages on a project like this. China might have a minor cost advantage due to cheap labor on the digging portion of the project but it wouldn't be hugely cheaper. The biggest costs will be the gear that goes into the accelerator and China enjoys no meaningful cost advantage there. It's all custom electronics and other stuff which is simply very expensive no matter who does it.
The point the poster made, which I think is legitimate, is that even a very small earthquake could probably be catastrophic for a collider's integrity and alignment.
That's an engineering issue that would exist no matter where you built the accelerator. You think there aren't fault lines near the LHC? Fermilab's Tevatron is within the New Madrid seismic zone. There basically is no place on earth that doesn't get earthquakes from time to time. You have to engineer the device with this in mind.
It can't work. I mean, no collider or supercollider can work, if they're built by a GOVERNMENT! Only private industry can build a working one...*
Oh, that's right, all of them were build by governments. No company's going to do it, because there's no ROI, or if there is, it may not be for decades....
mark
* Satire of libertarians, for libertarians, and others who aren't familiar with satire....
They'll cut corners, use cheap materials, politicians will pocket cash (so will suppliers, developers and builders) and if they manage to actually build it and turn it on it'll fizzle out or explode spectacularly.
A ring for electrons? I thought that was impossible at those energies.
Dear God. I can taste that level of bitterness from here.
I think we'd all rather see a world where China competes with the west in science and technology.
I am a scientist and I complain a lot about corruption in funding, publishing, and public representation of science; but as a whole it's a very honest and productive enterprise. This is much better than competing to see who can maintain the lowest cost labor pool or the biggest weapons.
DEAD WRONG! When you have to figure out how to do it, it is engineering. When you can read a manual and know how to do it, it's IKEA. Engineering is building things to solve problems, science is about knowledge NOT building things. Of course, engineering uses science to engineer its solutions, and science uses engineering to acquire more knowledge. In any case, the LHC is a product of engineering, the conclusions after analyzing the data it gathers are science. I know because I'm an engineer with a Ph.D.
Better be satire, because that is factually incorrect, there are industrial colliders, a subset of the thirty thousand of commercial particle accelerators in the world, government owned ones are 3% of the total.
Did you confuse buying cheap made in china crap from walmart with some of their higher quality stuff?
Flip that keyboard you are using over and let us know what it says, most likely "made in China".
what speak language you do?
"Either it will never work, or it's going to create a sub-atomic black hole that will eat up half of their installation"
We all joke about this, but the fact is, science is not mature enough to really know what's going to happen when we start playing around in the sub-atomic layer of the universe.
Does this mean that my wife (a particle physicist at Fermi Lab) and I may get to spend some time in China? She already gets to go to CERN upon occasion! :-)
Engineering is the application of science to the real world. Colliders had already been built before, so it was not a scientific task to build/research a new one. There were undoubtedly a few problems to be overcome, but they were not really scientific ones.
Of course once it had been built, it was science to find the Higgs and other particles by firing it up and seeing what happened.
Similarly, the Manhatten Project was again largely engineering; they largely knew an atomic bomb was theoretically possible. The main problem was to work out how to build a bomb such that a reasonable bang would occur with a robustly engineered device. i.e. that the energy budget would not be lost in the tolerances that they were capable of at the time.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
So Sidonia was Chinese...
PLA has been building an extensive tunnel network for decades. If they can connect a tunnel to the collider ring area, they can use the public construction of the collider tunnel as a cover to dump more earth from their secret tunnel projects.
And none of the industrial colliders even approach the energy or luminosity of state sponsored and internationally sponsored accelerators.
The sad thing about this is that US could do the same thing without problem but they choose to prioritize their military R&D instead of science R&D. Their military budged wouldn't even have a dent if they built one of these but no, must have new useless fighter jets instead.
...it's length, not girth that matters
correct, they instead actually create wealth and improve quality and length of human life
interesting list is known subatomic particles vs. those actually used in practical application. For example antiproton, muon, and pion have been used commercially.
Yet, somehow the chinese (han) nation managed to multiply to more than 1.3 billion people by now, while white and black numbers stagnated or even declined.
Yep, cockroaches sure can multiply, I'll give you that.
Not really. If nothing else, with a circular collider the beam can go around multiple times, increasing energy on every pass. The amount of energy you impart is only limited by how strong of a magnetic field you can create to twist the beam.
Sorry but this is simply wrong. Look up synchrotron radiation. For electrons this is a very important effect and your machine energy is limited by how much energy you can give to the electrons on each orbit of the machine. Even for the protons in the LHC this is a noticeable, but not energy limiting, effect.