Global research pushes boundaries

Although collider programs proposed by different countries are always fiercely competitive and can be highly nationalistic in flavor, the whiff of gunpowder is much fainter among physicists working on neutrino projects.

"The cost of a next-generation collider is so high that the world can only afford a machine capable of generating 100 TeV (1 trillion electron volts, a unit used to describe the minute amount of energy emitted when particles collide), no matter whether it's built in China, the United States, Europe, or Japan," said Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

"By contrast, investment in neutrino facilities is smaller, so we can carry out our experiments at many different places simultaneously," he said.