China will build a supercollider starting in 2020 that will eventually become the world's largest – twice as big as Switzerland's giant machine – to learn more about the Higgs boson, or "God Particle."
The Higgs boson, called by some as the "God particle" and which scientists believe could be the fundamental building block of the universe, was discovered at the physics lab at CERN's accelerator complex in Switzerland, according to
The Guardian.
China's planned mega supercollider will smash subatomic particles into each other at high speeds. It will be double the size of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which was built in 2008 and is currently the world's largest supercollider, says its
website.
The Large Hadron Collider consists of a 16.7-mile ring of superconducting magnets with accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles passing through it.
CERN, the acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire," or European Council for Nuclear Research, was created in 1952 to establish world-class fundamental physics research in Europe.
"(The Large Hadron Collider) is hitting its limits of energy level," said Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the China Academy of Sciences, according to
Phys.org.
The Chinese supercollider is expected to generate seven times the energy of the Large Hadron Collider.
Wang had said in the past that China's northern port city of Qinhuangdao, the starting point of the Great Wall, would be good location for the underground supercollider because of its geological conditions.
"This is a machine for the world and by the world: not a Chinese one," Wang previously said.
CERN, though, has announced its own upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider in which it plans for a "tenfold increase by 2025" in the rate of particle collisions that the machine can generate, said The Guardian.
"The LHC already delivers proton collisions at the highest energy ever," said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN's director-general.
"The High-Luminosity LHC will produce collisions 10 times more rapidly, increasing our discovery potential and transforming the LHC into a machine for precision studies: the natural next step for the high-energy frontier."
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