China Is Going to Build the World’s Largest Particle Accelerator

It might end up large enough to encircle all of Manhattan.

China has announced plans to begin building a 52-to-possibly-even-80 kilometer particle accelerator in 2020. Not only will it be twice the size of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, currently the largest machine on the planet, but it will be a whopping seven times more powerful than what CERN has.

Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the China Academy of Sciences, said that Qinhuangdao – a port city to the north-east of Beijing where the Great Wall begins – would be an ideal location for the facility due to favourable geological conditions.

“LHC is hitting its limits of energy level. It seems not possible to escalate the energy dramatically at the existing facility.” Wang told the China Daily. “[Ours will be] a machine for the world and by the world: not a Chinese one.”

Plans being drawn up by Bejing’s Institute of High Energy Physics are set to be finalized by the end of next year. If given government approval, the collider will begin operation in 2028. The new “Higgs factory” will aim at never-before-seen electron-positron collision speeds of 250 GeV.

“China will without question become the world leader in the field [of physics],” Professor Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study, told Al Jazeera.

So, what about all those people who claim accelerators of this magnitude have the ability to create mini black holes or open up portals to other dimensions (including some of CERN’s own scientists)?

If that’s possible, what will be possible with China’s new accelerator?