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<b>Particle Collider Edges Forward</b><br /><br />http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3583658.stm<br /><br />A key decision on the International Linear Collider, one of the grand scientific projects of the 21st Century, has been taken in China. <br /><br />Physicists told a Beijing conference that the multi-billion-dollar project should use superconducting technology to create its particle collisions. <br /><br />These would be high-energy impacts inside a 30km-long laboratory. <br /><br />The experiments should give scientists a deeper understanding of the materials used to construct the Universe. <br /><br />At the moment, the so-called Standard Model of particles and their interactions provides only a partial picture of the nature of the normal matter we see around us. <br /><br />Researchers know, however, the cosmos is dominated by other material which is invisible to current detection technologies. <br /><br />New light <br /><br />Europe is currently building a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at its Cern laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and this is expected to open up a new research frontier when it becomes operational in 2007. <br /><br />But scientists believe they will need the ILC to carry forward their studies and expand any discoveries made at the LHC. <br /><br />The ILC is a giant undertaking that could cost upwards of $5bn. It would accelerate electrons and positrons (the antimatter version of the electron) down two 15-km-long pipes and smash them together at a central point. <br /><br />In the debris, scientists would hope to see new particles flash into and out of view. <br /><br />For example, the collider could reveal details about the long sought Higgs boson, the particle said to explain why all others have mass. <br /><br />It may also shed light on the neutralino, a particle hypothesised to interact only weakly with everything around it but which may account for much of the "dark matter