China plans to invest US$ 6 billion to build a massive particle accelerator, one that would measure more than the double of what CERN measures. China’s version of CERN would measure between 50 and 100 kilometers and would be up to SEVEN times more powerful that the LHC in Switzerland. The blueprint for what scientists call a super collider, an underground facility to smash subatomic particles at high speeds, was drafted in 2014 by scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing. The project, dubbed the “Higgs Factory,” aims to build a facility capable of generating millions of Higgs boson particles, which physicists say form the building blocks of the universe.   According to China Daily, the new facility would be able to produce millions of Higgs bosons, many more than the European accelerator, where the Higgs boson particle was discovered in 2012.

The gigantic machine is currently in planning stages and construction is expected to start in 2021.

Even though the LHC has managed to find all the particles predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics (the theory that predicts all the constituents of ordinary matter) there is still a lot of stuff in the universe that needs explanation.

Looking at the picture above, ordinary matter (which gives rise to stars and galaxies) is only responsible for a 4.5% of the total mass of the universe. Another 23% is constituted by another mysterious kind of invisible matter (dark matter) and the remaining 72.5% by an even more mysterious form of energy, dark energy. This is why many scientists agree that an entirely new form of new physics is waiting on the “other side” of the Standard Model, and in order to address it, we need a much more powerful machine than what we have on Earth today.

The Standard Model of particle physics, for example, dues not offer an explanation for gravity, which is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Also, it does not say anything about the astronomical observations that have demonstrated the existence of dark matter, which does not emit any radiation (so we can not see it) and that relates to the rest of the universe precisely through gravity. The model also does not explain why matter prevailed over antimatter at the beginning of the universe, and to make matters worse, the small mass of the Higgs boson suggests that the matter of which we are all made of is fundamentally unstable.