NPI: Electron-positron collider

2024: Product Announcement

On March 29, 2024, the G.I. Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INF) announced the start of a project to create a new electron-positron collider with beam energy from 1 to 2.2 gigaelectron-volts (GeV). More than 20 billion rubles will be allocated for the project.

According to the deputy director of the INF for science Yevgeny Levichev, the funds will go primarily to the development of high-tech equipment. The creation of the installation does not involve the construction of new buildings. The collider is planned to be deployed on the basis of the existing infrastructure of the institute. According to Levichev, the implementation of the project will be about half the price of the Siberian Ring Photon Source synchrotron near Novosibirsk, the costs of which are estimated at 47.3 billion rubles. Thus, the cost of the new collider can be about 23 billion rubles.

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It is noted that the luminosity of the new complex, which received the preliminary name VEPP-6, will be an order of magnitude higher than that achieved earlier at other similar installations. The collider will detect exotic forms of matter, in particular, light quarks (fundamental components of matter) and particles that can consist of gluons alone (elementary particles, carriers of strong interaction). Levichev noted that as of March 2024, there are no colliders in the world operating in the energy range from 1 to 2.2 GeV and giving high luminosity (the number of births of elementary particles when electron beams and positrons collide).

The project is planned to be implemented in approximately three years. It is assumed that by that time the old collider will VEPP-4 be decommissioned. The director of the INF Pavel Logachev notes that the construction of the collider will cover the needs of physicists in the relevant area for about 20 years.^[1]

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