Race To The Top: China Plans To Build World’s Largest Particle Collider Beating CERN’s LHC

China’s Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) has plans to build the world’s largest particle collider with a circumference of 100 km, Scientific American has reported. This will be substantially larger than the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s premier science agency.

The Chinese collider, called the Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC), will be built at an estimated cost of $4.3 billion and will be ready by 2030. European LHC was built at around twice this price tag.

This experiment will help scientists observe the production of Higgs Boson (dubbed the ‘God Particle”) by smashing an electron, with its antimatter counterpart, a positron (positively charged electron). This will provide a more detailed and accurate observation of nature’ mysteries when compared to LHC’s proton-proton collisions.

“No one has ever built a machine this large before, and we want to minimise the cost. Its specifications are different from those of any other machine in the world in the past, and we have to prove that it is feasible,” said Wang Yifang, director of IHEP, said while commenting on the go-ahead given by an international team of experts for the collider’s design.

While electron is a fundamental particle (indivisible any further) of the universe, protons are made of other tiny other particles called quarks.

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