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.
