CERN Council President: "Confident" that China can build the world's largest collider

Observer.com

2024-05-07 09:59Posted on the official account of Shanghai Observer.com

(Observer News)

The question of whether China should spend huge sums of money to build the world's largest particle collider has sparked a rare heated debate in the domestic scientific community. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported on May 6 that Eliezer Rabinovic, chairman of the board of governors of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and a top Israeli theoretical physicist, expressed his views on this when he visited China a few days ago, saying that he was "confident" that China is now capable of accomplishing this feat.

Headquartered near Geneva, Switzerland, CERN currently operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most energetic particle accelerator, with an orbital circumference of nearly 27 kilometers. The 100-kilometer-long Ring Positron Collider, the next generation of large colliders proposed by mainland's high-energy physicists in 2012, will dwarf the LHC.

Although the CEPC project is still in the preparation stage and construction has not yet begun, its huge cost has caused a lot of controversy earlier. According to the report, the strongest opposition came from the famous physicist and Nobel laureate Yang Zhenning. He believes that the project is time-consuming, costly, and a "bottomless pit", while China has more pressing issues to solve, such as economic development and environmental protection. In addition, he insisted that high-energy physics would not be the way forward in the 21st century, and that the large collider feast was over, and that it was on the end of the road since 30 years ago.

In early April, Rabinovic was invited by the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for the research of the CEPC project, to China for exchanges and to share CERN's ideas and plans for its next-generation large collider. The South China Morning Post said Mr. Rabinovic said he had read Mr. Yang's rebuttal at the time and other analyses by Chinese scientists, but he believed Mr. Yang, like many others, "underestimated China's capabilities."

On April 1, Rabinovic gave a report at the High Energy Forum of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Image source: The official website of the Institute of High Energy Physics

Rabinovic said he had seen great progress in Chinese science and a strong pool of scientific talent during his trip. "Over the years, many Chinese physicists have worked at CERN and have accumulated some knowledge and experience, and these people are very capable. The report pointed out that Wang Yifang, the current director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, graduated from the Department of Physics of Nanjing University in 1984 and studied under the Nobel laureate Ding Zhaozhong to engage in research in high energy physics at CERN.

Rabinovic said Chinese scientists are making great efforts to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the CEPC project, such as the conservation of energy. In his opinion, the approach of Chinese scientists to the challenges in this project is not much different from that of CERN, the world's most important particle physics research institution, "so I am confident that Chinese scientists can do it [to build the largest collider]".

"I think there's no doubt that tens of thousands of scientists around the world, including the United States, Europe and China, are convinced that this is a good project to do. Rabinovic said.

It is reported that CEPC's "Technical Design Report" has completed the international review and was officially published and published internationally in December last year. As the main initiator of CEPC, Wang Yifang revealed in an interview with the Global Times in March this year that he estimated that it would take about three years for CEPC to actually start construction, but it still needs to obtain government approval and funding.

On the issue of funding, Yang Zhenning pointed out in a 2016 rebuttal article that China's budget for building a megacollider cannot be less than 20 billion US dollars (about 144.16 billion yuan).

In this regard, Wang Yifang once said that the project cost of 36 billion yuan was the result of their two estimates. He also admits that the total cost is not cheap, but he also explained that the research model of high-energy physics is different from other fields, and if CEPC can support the work of thousands of scientists in the coming decades, the average cost will not be so high. "If the operating costs, personnel costs, etc. are taken into account, the per capita cost of scientists in the field of high-energy physics will not exceed that of scientists in other fields. ”

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