The Experimental Physics Division (EPD) of IHEP is an established research center for experimental particle physics in China. It is also a development center for the technologies needed for particle physics experiments, including advanced detectors, electronics, high speed data acquisition and signal processing, and superconducting magnets. The EPD was responsible for the design and construction of the BEijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment and the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, which are now running. The Division is currently building the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), which expects to start data taking in 2020.

Many important results in the 2-5 GeV tau-charm physics region have been achieved at BESIII, which is located at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider (BEPC-II). These include the discoveries of the charmonium(-like) states Zc (3900) and Zc(4020), and the first observation of many new light hadrons. The Daya Bay experiment discovered a new type of neutrino oscillation and precisely measured the oscillation amplitude corresponding to the neutrino mixing angle q13.

The EPD participates in many international experiments, including ATLAS at the LHC, Belle II at SuperKEKB, PANDA at FAIR in GSI, the ILC, COMET, MOMENT and EXO. The EPD ATLAS team, with  13 staff members involved in the collaboration, plays an important role in the study of the Higgs boson and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, as well as participating in the ATLAS Phase-II Inner Tracker Upgrade project.

The Chinese high energy physics community has proposed a Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) as a Higgs Factory to perform precision measurements of the Higgs boson. It could then be upgraded to a Super proton-proton Collider (SppC) to reach unprecedentedly high energies and search for new physics. The EPD leads the pre-CDR (preliminary Conceptual Design Report) and CDR studies for the design of the detector as well as for the simulations and physics.

There are about 160 staff members in the EPD. The deputy directors are Jun Cao, Xiaoyan Shen, Zheng Wang and Kejun Zhu. Changzheng Yuan heads the EPD Science Committee