China making good progress in building world’s largest supercollider

Research and development into the initial key equipment needed for the world’s most powerful electron collider, the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), has made solid progress, said one of the project’s lead scientists on Sunday.

Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing,

and a deputy to the National People’s Congress, made the comments to the Global Times on the sidelines of the ongoing national two sessions. The overall development of the CEPC project is moving forward smoothly, with some of the first equipment reaching design standards.

Klystron is among the first batch of key equipment for the super-sized collider, which scored a 60 percent efficiency in the prototype test earlier this year, reaching world advanced levels, up from below 50 percent, according to Wang.

Wang’s team aims to produce an even better version of the klystron with 80 percent efficiency this year.

The location for the CEPC has yet to be determined, Wang noted.

The CEPC project will reportedly cost 35 billion yuan ($5.05 billion) and will have a circumference of 100 kilometers, with center-mass energy of up to 240 giga electron-volts, both setting a world record.

Chinese scientists are eyeing the completion for CEPC construction by 2030, Global Times previously learned from IHEP.

The conceptual design for the CEPC passed international inspections in September 2019. Scientists from the US, Europe and Japan have participated in designing the project, and will work on the building process and conduct research with the collider.

The Large Hadron Collider, the Swiss project near Geneva, is currently the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider and reportedly the largest machine in the world.