BEPC II Approved by the State Council
The upgrade project of the Beijing Electron Positron Collider known as BEPC II was approved by the State Council on February 10, 2003. This indicates that BEPC II officially gets funded. According to estimate, its total investment is 640 million Chinese yuan (roughly 77 million US dollars). It is expected that this project will be basically completed in 5 years.
The BEPC was accomplished in October 1988. Its successful completion and the important results achieved in the study of t charm physics made possible for China to have a place in the international community of high energy physics. For BEPC II, the current collider and detector will be thoroughly upgraded. The collider will adopt the most advanced double-ring alternating colliding technology in the world. After the BEPC is upgraded, the luminosity will be increased by a factor of two, reaching 3– 10×1032 cm-2s-1 at the center of mass energy 3.77 GeV. The Beijing Spectrometer (BES) will also be thoroughly upgraded to increase the measurement precision, reduce systematic errors and meet the requirement of the high counting rate operation of BEPC II. Once completed, the BEPC will continue to maintain its leading position as against all accelerators of the same kind in the world.
The physics goal of BEPC II is precision measurement in the t charm energy region and study of new physics. It is expected that many important results will be achieved in studying the frontier subjects of t charm physics, such as searching for glueball, the study of quark-glueball mixing and strange particles, searching for1P1 and ¢hc, the precision measurement of CKM matrix, the study of charmonium and its decay property, the study of lepton and hadron spectroscopy and hadron excited state, the precision measurement of R value in the energy region of 2-5 GeV, the study of D physics, the precision measurement of decay constant fD and fDs, the study of lepton physics, searching for D0 –`D0 mixing and CP violation, etc. It is expected that some of the original innovative results will produce important influence in the international community of high energy physics.
BEPC II offers a new developmental opportunity to high energy physics in China and at the same time, it also poses a serious challenge to it. However, IHEP is determined to have it completed according to schedule and within budget.