Japan’s rival particle accelerator celebrates its first particle collisions

engineering careers  Japan’s rival particle accelerator celebrates its first particle collisions

The SuperKEKB particle accelerator, which began development in Japan in 2010 and has been seen as a rival to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, has circulated its first particles around its underground ‘track’ at close to the speed of light. The SuperKEKB facility cost £71 million to develop, and features a particle detector that was designed by a team of over 600 scientists. Next year, the Japanese team will begin accelerating and colliding particles in a compressed area, producing B mesons and tau leptons which scientists will study in the hope of uncovering previously unknown areas of physics.