China can build the largest collider on Earth, CERN president says
- Eliezer Rabinovici says he is ‘confident’ Chinese scientists can build the world’s largest particle accelerator
- The proposed Circular Electron Positron Collider has caused much debate in China over whether it justifies the US$5 billion cost
One of Israel’s top physicists has entered the debate over whether China should build the world’s largest collider, saying he believes the country is now capable of the feat.
China’s proposed 36 billion yuan (US$5 billion) Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), also known as a Higgs factory, would dwarf the LHC with a circumference of 100km.
The Chinese government has not given the final approval to the project, which has sparked widespread debate in China among the scientific community and the general public.
The strongest opposition has come from legendary physicist and Nobel laureate Yang Chen-ning.
Rabinovici said he had read what Yang said and the reactions of Chinese scientists at the time, but he believed that Yang, like many others, “underestimated the capability that exists here in China”.
“Over the years, many Chinese physicists have worked at CERN and have gained some knowledge and experience. These people are very capable,” Rabinovici said.
For example, Wang Yifang, the mastermind behind the CEPC project, once worked at CERN with Nobel Prize winner Samuel Chao Chung Ting after graduating from Nanjing University with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1984.
CERN is now considering expanding the LHC into a machine nearly 100km long, and Rabinovici was invited by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing to share some thoughts and plans for the new project.
“Their approach to the challenges is not much different from CERN’s, so I am confident that Chinese scientists can do it,” he said.
The question of whether China should build the world’s largest collider has been debated in China for nearly a decade.
“I think there’s no doubt that tens of thousands of scientists from all over the world, including the United States, Europe and China, strongly believe that this is a good project that is worth doing,” Rabinovici said.
A physicist at a top mainland university, who declined to be named because he is not authorised to speak to the media, said the team led by Wang was made up of outstanding scientists.
Over the past decade, he said, their research had been highly regarded by international physicists, and the CEPC project they were designing was attracting huge global attention.
The physicist also “strongly disagrees” with Yang’s argument that investing in a huge project like this would squeeze funding for other urgent social issues and other areas of science.
In response to the financial burden of the project, which Yang previously warned was a “bottomless pit”, Wang recently admitted that “36 billion yuan is not cheap”.
However, in the interview with the Global Times in March, Wang pointed out that if the CEPC could support the work of thousands of scientists for decades to come, the average cost would not be that high.
Wang added that the CEPC’s “technical design report” – which took more than 1,000 scientists from 24 countries five years to compile – had passed an international review and received “overwhelming feedback” from the physics community when it was released in December.