The quest to understand the “God particle” may have just hit a wall in China.
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An ambitious multibillion-dollar plan to build the world’s largest particle collider – a machine that could have placed the country at the pinnacle of global basic research and scientific talent – may be abandoned, according to its lead scientist.
The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), designed to smash electrons and their antimatter counterparts to study Higgs bosons with unprecedented precision, was not put forward for government consideration in China’s next five-year plan, according to Wang Yifang, of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing.
“Although our proposal that CEPC be included in the next five-year plan was not successful, the institute will continue this effort, which an international collaboration has developed for the past 10 years,” Wang told CERN Courier, a magazine published by European particle physics lab CERN, last month.
Wang said his team planned to submit the proposal again in 2030 unless CERN’s similar project – the Future Circular Collider (FCC) – received official approval before then. In that case, he said, Chinese physicists would seek to join the FCC effort and abandon the CEPC.
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Proposed in 2012, soon after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the CEPC has been the focus of fierce debate in China. Supporters, including mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, have argued that the collider would attract thousands of leading scientists from around the world and drive technological innovation far beyond particle physics.
But Nobel laureate Chen-ning Yang repeatedly voiced opposition, arguing that China should not rush into building such an expensive machine. Yang, who died in October, questioned whether the collider’s scientific pay-off could justify its enormous cost and warned that it could become a “bottomless pit” for national resources.