The 'fashion front' of high energy physics

Related: Works like a charm

Extreme science comes at a cost. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built for about 5 billion Swiss francs ($5 billion).

"LHC is the fashion front of high energy physics and a mission impossible for any single country to accomplish, given the funding, technology and talent it requires," says Zhao Zhengguo, a leading high-energy physicist in China, who has participated in the CERN ATLAS Experiment since 2001.

ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the LHC, the other is CMS.

"For example, the end cap muon spectrometer, which composes just a small part of ATLAS, converged the efforts of more than 10 countries," Zhao says.

"Some countries are in charge of making the chambers, some produce precision machinery, alignment, micro-electronics, etcetera. This project sets a high demand on participating country's industrial technology and the expertise of experts."

Between 1994 and 2008, more than 7,000 scientists from over 80 countries and regions took part in the construction of LHC.

Before LHC was switched on, the Tevatron in the United States was the most powerful collider in the world and in its final years of operation, it raced to catch a first glimpse of the Higgs boson.

Although Tevatron was closed in 2011 due to budget constraints, the scientists involved in that project announced in March they had found evidence of a new fundamental particle that had a mass that fits in with predictions for the Higgs boson and was similar to experimental evidence announced by the Swiss-based scientists in December.

But the role of LHC is likely to be challenged soon. Some 2,000 accelerator and particle physicists, engineers, theorists, technicians, students, software experts and others, from all corners of the world, are working on the design and technologies for the next-generation particle accelerator International Linear Collider.

The project aims to complement LHC and shed more light on the secrets of the universe.