Design reports released for proposed China supercollider

China’s plans to develop a next-generation particle collider have moved into a new phase with the release of a Conceptual Design Report (CDR).

Speaking recently to an international audience at a workshop in Beijing, the chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, Geoffrey Taylor from Australia’s University of Melbourne, described it as “a significant milestone along the road to such an important facility for fundamental physics”.

Construction of the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) is expected to start in 2022 and be completed in 2030.{%recommended 510%}

“The CDR signifies that we have completed the basic design of the accelerator, detector and civil engineering for the whole project,” says Gao Yuanning, chair of the CEPC Institutional Board. “Now our next step will focus on the R&D of key technologies and prototypes for the CEPC.”

The entire report is publicly available. Volume I covers the design of the accelerator complex. Volume II presents the physics and describes the detector concepts and technological options.

The new supercollider is expected to complement and go beyond the physics of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. It is considered an important part of the global plan for high-energy physics research and will support a comprehensive research program by scientists around the world. 

Chinese scientists proposed the facility in September 2012, just two months after the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC. 

The CEPC will be housed in an underground tunnel with a 100-kilometre circumference, and has been described as a “Higgs factory”. A planned second stage will incorporate what has been termed a Super Proton-Proton Collider, “focused on new physics beyond the Standard Model”.