China has brought online one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators. The High Intensity Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF), in Huizhou, Guangdong, passed its technological acceptance review and began trial operations on July 21, China Daily reported. Built by the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is designed to generate the most intense pulsed beams of heavy ions in the world—a “super microscope” for probing the structure of matter.
The facility covers 32 hectares, with a 2-km beam line 13 meters underground, and is the first to marry a superconducting linear accelerator to a fast-cycling synchrotron. Getting there took over a decade of engineering, including power supplies that can swing by thousands of amps in a tenth of a second and a vacuum thinner than the surface of the Moon, chief engineer Yang Jiancheng told China Daily. In commissioning it has already set beam-intensity records for oxygen and bismuth ions and turned up two previously unknown isotopes.
