CHICAGO, Aug. 21 -- What will succeed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to continue the research of Higgs boson and other particles after the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator finishes its mission?
Physicists in Japan, China and the Europe's particle-physics laboratory CERN are trying to offer an answer, according to recent reports about the the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago on Aug. 8.
The 27-kilometer-long LHC at CERN will reach its maximum-energy run in 2018, but the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 just opened a new door for particle physics and inspired the scientists to do more exploration.
With a team of top international physicists, CERN has a plan to design a 100-kilometer-circumference circular machine that could smash protons together at more than 7 times the energy of the LHC.
However, CERN might not start the action as early as the mid-2030s because they will be occupied firstly by the work to upgrade the intensity rather than the energy of the LHC's proton beams, which are made to collide in the accelerator.
Japan is quicker at the move. The Asian country has expressed the willingness to host the International Linear Collider (ILC), which is designed to have a 31-kilometer-long track and can better provide cleaner collisions for precision measurements.
Japan postponed its announcement of hosting due in 2016 because Japanese scientists advised the authority to wait and see the further results of the LHC's funding, according to reports by the Nature magazine.
After all, even with support from the United Statescounterparts, the cost to build the ILC is estimated at 10 billion U.S. dollars, too much for the country to afford alone.
Japan needs other countries's funding, Masanori Yamauchi, director-general of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, was quoted by the Nature as saying.
China also has a part in the action with an idea to host a circular collider which will be 50-100 kilometers long and apply electron-positron smasher.
The Chinese plan, secured by governmental funding and partially sponsored by the international community, aims to host the upgraded collider in the 2030s.
