Chinese-American Nobel Prize Laureate Chen-Ning Franklin Yang is staunchly against Beijing's plan to build the world's largest particle accelerator in China, mostly on account of its massive cost and questionable physics.

Yang, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, opposes building the supercollider called the "Circular Electron Positron Collider" (CEPC) because it's far too expensive. He also contends the $6 billion needed to build the machine will be better spent on social programs assisting China's poor.

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More important, Yang doesn't believe the science behind the project justifies the massive cost.

He contends there's little chance a collider far larger than CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland will succeed in discovering new particles where the LHC has failed. He described China's attempt to do so as being "a guess on top of a guess" in an article published online Sept.4.

Yang, 93, said high-energy physicists should postpone big accelerator projects for now and focus their efforts on new experimental and theoretical approaches. He also opposes the Super Proton-Proton Collider (SPPC), the future upgraded version of the CEPC.

CEPC will serve as a Higgs Factory where precise measurement of Higgs properties will be its top priority. It will allow stringent tests of the Standard Model (SM) with precision measurements at the Z pole and WW thresholds.

The machine will offer a unique opportunity for direct searches for New Physics in the high-energy range far beyond LHC's reach.

CEPC is a long-term collider project divided into two phases. The first phase will construct a circular electron-positron collider in a tunnel with a circumference of 50 km to 70 km with detectors installed at two interaction points.

The machine is expected to collide electron and positron beams at the center-of-mass energy of 240 GeV to 250 GeV gigaelectron volts) with an instantaneous luminosity of 2×1034 cm-2 s-1.

The baseline design considers a single ring in a 50 km to 70 km tunnel and electron/positron beams following a pretzelled orbit in the ring.

The second phase of the project will upgrade the machine to a proton-proton collider with an unprecedented center-of-mass energy of 50 TeV to 70 TeV (teraelectron volt). 

CEPC is to be built at Qinhuangdao, a port city on the coast of China located in northeastern Hebei province.

TagsChen-Ning Franklin Yang, Nobel Prize Laureate, Circular Electron Positron Collider, CEPC, Qinhuangdao