A bird' s-eye-view of the Beijing Electron Positron Collider.
At a meeting on February 10, the State Council finally gave the green light for a proposal to upgrade the Beijing Electron Positron Collider (BEPC) at the CAS Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP).
According to a news release from IHEP, the government will inject a total of 640 million yuan ($77 million) to renovate the project, dubbed as BEPCII, which is scheduled to complete in five years. This will enable the BEPC to maintain its leading position in the field.
The BEPC, which was put into operation in October, 1988, is one of China' s flagship projects in basic research. Its achievement in the study of tau charm physics enables the country to have a niche in the world community of high energy physics. The current BEPCII project aims to carry out a thorough upgrade of the collider and its detectors by adopting the state-of-the-art double-ring alternating colliding technology. According to scientists, its luminosity will be hiked by two orders of magnitude, reaching 3–10x10
32 / cm
2s in the energy zone of 3.77 GeV. At the same time, Beijing Electron Spectroscope (BES) will undergo an all-round renovation to raise its measurement precision and reduce its systematic errors so that it would be compatible with the high-counting rate operation in the upgraded BEPCII.
