China's proposed supercollider will be twice the size of the Large Hadron Collider or CERN in Switzerland that helped discover the Higgs Boson or the God Particle in 2012.
It will also serve as a symbol of the country's rise as a global superpower by putting it at the forefront of scientific research that has implications on everything ranging from advancements in computer science to new drug discovery.
Prof. Wang Yifang is the Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"This large circuit collider has two phases; the first phase (called the Circular Electron Positron Collider) is an electron Positron Collider, and the second phase is a Proton Collider. By having this machine we can have a total of one million higgs particles. By analyzing all these Higgs particles we can understand its detailed properties. With all these projects we will be in a leading position in particle physics."
The discovery of the Higgs Boson two years ago was seen as one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in human history, fundamentally changing the way we understand our universe, how it originated and its future.
But China's particle accelerator promises to go a step further in unlocking the mysteries of the universe.
It will be able to recreate, inside the accelerator, the hyper-energy conditions that existed following the Big Bang, when the building blocks of the universe were formed. This will help Physicists explore the origins of matter, energy, and explore the phenomena of time and space.
Prof. Wang Yifang says this might help physicists discover a new range of particles beyond those already known to mankind, and charted in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
"Having the Proton Collider we can further study the properties of Higgs (Boson Particle) and this can only be done at very high energy Proton machine. And after that when you have all these studies of Standard Model particles then you can look for the signatures that deviate from the Predictions of the Standard Model and by that you can discover the new physics (particles) after that."
A preliminary conceptual design for this cutting-edge particle physics laboratory is now almost complete. China is four years ahead of their European competition, CERN who also want to build the only other known super collider in the world. The Unites States gave up plans to do it due to the high investment needed. But even China's project –if all goes according to plan - will only be completed in 2045.
The initial design for China's supercollider shows a perfect circle-shaped city, where the top physicists from across the world, are working alongside new-technology companies and other futuristic businesses in a kind of Scientific Utopia. It may even give China a fair shot at winning its first ever Nobel Prize in science.
For CRI, I'm Poornima Weerasekara.
