The Budker Nuclear Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian branch will test the Standard Model, a theory of fundamental particles and their interaction, with a new electron-positron collider.
“We aspire to take a very large step and increase the beam of our next electron-positron collider at relatively low energy, up to 5 GeV,” Institute Director Academician Alexander Skrinsky told Interfax.
The beam, i.e. collisions of elementary particles per second, of the VEPP-2000 collider, which is under construction, is expected to be approximately 1,000 times larger than the institute has achieved by now and even more than in the Large Hadron Collider, he said.
The Standard Model has exceptionally high forecasting power and any significant deviations from it have not been discovered in a great variety of experiments, but it is obviously necessary to go beyond the Standard Model, the expert continued.
“There are such phenomena as dark matter and dark energy, which cannot be described by the Standard Model, and one has to go beyond it in order to find an explanation. There is huge experimental work ahead, primarily in cosmology, astronomy and, certainly, high energy particle physics,” Skrinsky said.
“In this context the Novosibirsk experiments, first of all, our new collider VEPP-2000, are a pioneer project testing the Standard Model, one of the greatest natural science theories of the 20th century,” he said.
The Budker Nuclear Physics Institute of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences is a leading world center dealing with high energy particle physics, controlled thermonuclear synthesis and applied physics. The institute is unique in Russia by the majority of its areas.
