Russian scientists propose to develop new collider in 15-20 years

Moscow, Sep 20 (UNI) Russian scientists have proposed to develop a new collider that could be needed to replace CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 15-20 years, Alexander Bondar, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences has said.

Bondar said the LHC now getting up to speed at CERN, the French acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will provide scientific data for up to two decades, but scientists need to consider what happens next.

"It is necessary to think about the next step in fundamental physics research, about what can make the next project," he told RIA Novosti news agency.

He said linear colliders could be the future.

Another Russian researcher, Viktor Matveev, said earlier that scientists around the world were considering a Russian proposal to build a new collider in the Moscow Region.

Russian Science and Education Minister Andrei Fursenko, however, said yesterday that those plans were "senseless" and urged Russian scientists to join in large-scale international projects.

On September 10, scientists at CERN successfully fired the first beam of protons round the vast underground circular device - 27 km in circumference and 100 m below the French-Swiss border - which is run from a control room in a suburb of Geneva.

By colliding particles in front of immensely powerful detectors, scientists hope to detect the Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God particle," which was hypothesized in the 1960s to explain how particles acquire mass. Discovering the particle could explain how matter appeared in the split-second after the Big Bang.

The international LHC project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.

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