China Plans Particle Colliders That Would Dwarf CERN's LHC 219
ananyo (2519492) writes Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, working with international collaborators, are planning to build a "Higgs factory" by 2028 — a 52-kilometer underground ring that would smash together electrons and positrons. Collisions of these fundamental particles would allow the Higgs boson to be studied with greater precision than at the much smaller (27 km) Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Physicists say that the proposed US$3-billion machine is within technological grasp and is considered conservative in scope and cost. But China hopes that it would also be a stepping stone to a next-generation collider — a super proton-proton collider — in the same tunnel. The machine would be a big leap for China. The country's biggest current collider is just 240 meters in circumference.
Super-collider (Score:5, Funny)
So I said, "Super-collider? I just met her!" [audience laughs] And then they built the super collider. - Humorbot 5.0
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AWKWARD
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Will they have to buy a new one every year?
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Will they have to buy a new one every year?
No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.
Also the user manual will be so bad, they won't figure out how to use it until 2045.
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Will they have to buy a new one every year?
No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.
They'll offer to replace it, but only if you pay the shipping costs to send it back to Shenzhen.
How many broken parts trying to spin up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cern had how many set backs while trying to power the thing up in the early stages of testing? With all the corruption China has I wonder how this will compare.
Re:How many broken parts trying to spin up? (Score:5, Funny)
Either it will never work, or it's going to create a sub-atomic black hole that will eat up half of their installation, or it's going to create a soccer ball-sized black hole that could have destroyed our entire solar system if it weren't for the fact that aliens will stop them 3.14159265359 seconds before the event.
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Why wouldn't they:
... the second has been defined as the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom
It's clearly the obvious way to define time.
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They rounded it down to 9 billion even.
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Re:How many broken parts trying to spin up? (Score:5, Funny)
Base 2 is real cool, you can count up to 1023 on your fingers; sadly I keep getting thrown out of noisy bars every time I try to order 4 beers in binary.
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I wonder how many Slashdot reader will even understand that joke, and that makes me sad.
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Then again, how many Slashdot readers are left-handed?
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I was not aware that the French Revolutionary government was a communist one. In fact I don't think communism even existed when the metric system was invented.
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*yes I know bout clock ticks, just go with it.
The flavour of sour grapes (Score:5, Insightful)
Cern had how many set backs while trying to power the thing up in the early stages of testing? With all the corruption China has I wonder how this will compare.
Of course CERN had problems - this is not engineering, but science. The big difference between the two being that you call it engineering, when you know in advance how to do, and science when you don't. No doubt, the first time a simple van-der-Graf accellerator was built, they had to overcome a number of problems; now, it is something you'd let a student do, because all the technical problems have been ironed out. And when/if China builds this new cyclotron, they will run into a large number of technical problems; of course they will. No need to start constructing fables about "all the corruption"; all that says is that you are suffering from petty envy.
The flavour of sour grapes (Score:2, Insightful)
DEAD WRONG! When you have to figure out how to do it, it is engineering. When you can read a manual and know how to do it, it's IKEA. Engineering is building things to solve problems, science is about knowledge NOT building things. Of course, engineering uses science to engineer its solutions, and science uses engineering to acquire more knowledge. In any case, the LHC is a pr
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Actually China *does* have a lot of corruption. So does the US. But they have corruption in different places. (I can't speak for the EU, and I'm not even sure it's the same from country to country.)
The question is "Does China have corruption in places that would grossly interfere with the construction of a large new particle accelerator? I don't know. The US did. The Supercollider proposed location was chosen because of corruption, and the project was cancelled because of corruption. OTOH, it would h
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If the Chinese decide building this collider is a matter of National Pride and Honor, God help anyone or anything that gets in the way; any corruption will just be greasing the wheels of the juggernaut.
Sometimes I am jealous (Score:1)
For all the downside of the one-party system and semi-centrally planned economy, sometimes I am jealous that China can just move forward with things like this. Environmentalist cry about a rare species becoming extinct? Screw them. A few thousand people displaced? Deal with it. If something is in the nation interest, it gets done.
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There are two major downsides to a one-party system centrally planned economy.
1) Sometimes the guy at the top makes mistakes, and nobody who knows better can call him on them. See "Great Leap Forwards".
2) Sometimes the guy at the top doesn't have the best interests of the country in mind, and nobody can make him.
Mind you, the US recently has been exhibiting those very same problems. In the US it's fairly clear that the problem has been that:
1) Corporations are not people. They should not have rights. (
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You forget the main downside of all centrally planned economies.
Excessive concentration of power. Power corrupts...it's actually amazing that socialism works at all.
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No. That was point:
2) Sometimes the guy at the top doesn't have the best interests of the country in mind, and nobody can make him.
If you want to call that corruption you can. In my mind it merely includes corruption.
FWIW, I don't think that power corrupts, rather it's lack of consequences. This is closely related, but not the same. But it's also true that power attracts the corruptible (as a gradient). Different people are corruptible in different ways and to different degrees. And one consequence of
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Do you get those by being bitten by a radioactive gadfly?
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Make-work Project? (Score:2)
This sounds like a make-work project by the Chinese government to try to boost their economy. Construction is a huge business in China that accounts for a large portion of their GDP - that's why you see things like the "ghost cities" there, where construction workers built thousands of apartments and offices that aren't ever going to be used simply because the Chinese government needs to keep pumping money into construction.
Digging a 57-kilometer underground tunnel would probably put plenty of construction
Re:Make-work Project? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every country has make-work projects, some of them even have additional benefits - the EU is currently reviewing a energy savings plan where one of the main points is "costs will be offset by the jobs created to implement this directive". Make-work.
In reality, the Chinese project is definitely not make-work if they plan to do actual research. The "ghost cities" you talk about are actually gradually filling up as more population moves from rural settings into the cities - this has been a long term goal of the Chinese government, but their "long terms" are a fair longer than the "around next election time" terms that westerners tend to think in.
If you want to see some real "ghost cities" there are plenty in Spain, entire towns and cities, with airports, which were built to sustain the Spanish building industry during the 2008-2013 period, and the properties have never been put on the market.
Suboptimal Design (Score:5, Interesting)
In reality, the Chinese project is definitely not make-work if they plan to do actual research.
True but a circular design for a electron-positron collider is far from the most efficient. At the energies needed to create the Higgs the energy loss caused by bending the electrons around in a ring means that the ring has to be far longer in circumference than a 'one-shot' linear collider would need to be. Worse if we find something even more exciting like Supersymmetry in our next run of the LHC starting this coming March you will never be able to increase the energy of a circular e-p machine to study it whereas with a linear collider you can extend it.
A circular machine only makes sense with heavier particles like protons but I question whether the cost savings of a single tunnel for both an e-p machine and a future proton machine will outweigh the massive increase in the cost of the magnets and accelerating cavities for the e-p machine.
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There are a variety of tradeoffs between circular and linear electron / positron machines. At very high energies (>~500GeV CM) the circular machines become impractical At low energies (100 GeV CM) a circular machine is considerably simpler and cheaper. Inbetween the trade-offs are not completely obvious.
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Synchrotron Radiation (Score:2)
Not really. If nothing else, with a circular collider the beam can go around multiple times, increasing energy on every pass. The amount of energy you impart is only limited by how strong of a magnetic field you can create to twist the beam.
Sorry but this is simply wrong. Look up synchrotron radiation [wikipedia.org]. For electrons this is a very important effect and your machine energy is limited by how much energy you can give to the electrons on each orbit of the machine. Even for the protons in the LHC this is a noticeable, but not energy limiting, effect.
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I can comment though that the people who spend their life designing, building, and
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With a really large ring doesn't bremstrallung become less of a problem? And for protons that shouldn't be a problem at all.
IIRC, when the Stanford Linear Accelerator was built there were comments to the effect than a longer one would always be impractical. This is clearly incorrect, as if one were built in space there wouldn't be any curvature problems, but it may inidcate that there are severe problems with building a longer one in a strong gravitational field.
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Or even the illusion of one.
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I wasn't talking about China.
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It's what they have always done. The candidates you get to chose however are all from the same party, or officially blessed.
Haven't you heard of all that stuff going on in Hong Kong, how Beijing previously promised direct elections for the Chief Exec via Universal Sufferage in 2017, and just recently then they announced that all candidates have to be vetted by the 1200-person "Election Committee" stacked with pro-Beijing representatives? That caused ~500k people to take the streets and protest in Hong Kong.
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It's what they have always done. The candidates you get to chose however are all from the same party, or officially blessed.
And that's different from the reality of Western "Democracies" how exactly? I'm not talking about what is, in theory, possible but rather what we actually observe.
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The "shock therapy" theory of introducing democratic reforms all at once doesn't actually work.
It worked fine for South Korea, Taiwan, Poland, the Czech Republic...
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Taiwan had various degrees of local democratic reform culminating in the first presidential election in 1996, but it wasnt until 2000 that the Kuomintang party actually lost power in an election.
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And really, the Western powers have no right to expect and force others to democratize when all the Western powers grew their power unde
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That's like saying " we have a functioning democracy, except our King tells everyone what to do, but all the ministers and the guy selling candy bars are elected!"
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Honestly, I have no doubt that China can pull this off, but at what cost?
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You should try understanding modern agriculture. The hint is that subsistence farming tends to be wildly inefficient.
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His friends all agree. Monocultures are unsustainable, or something.
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A true Democracy would be a terrible system indeed, with the rich even more firmly in control. People give away their password for chocolate bars (70%) or even nothing (34%!), so voting for some obscure law, probably a chocolate bar would do just fine, or at least a threat of getting fired.
Things change when you toss in the second or the third rich person. They will need to offer more than a candy bar.
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Republic comes from the Latin "res publica", and normally means a government or country not headed by a hereditary monarch. That leaves a lot of room for all sorts of governing systems. The US is a republic and a democracy (or at least used to be, and can be again). The UK is a democracy but not a republic. Nazi Germany was a republic but not a democracy. North Korea is not a republic (with three Kims in a row, I'm calling it a monarchy) and not a democracy.
My observation is that, the more democratic
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This sounds like a make-work project by the Chinese government to try to boost their economy. Construction is a huge business in China that accounts for a large portion of their GDP - that's why you see things like the "ghost cities" there, where construction workers built thousands of apartments and offices that aren't ever going to be used simply because the Chinese government needs to keep pumping money into construction.
Digging a 57-kilometer underground tunnel would probably put plenty of construction workers to work for a while - not to mention hauling in all the equipment, doing all the wiring and piping, etc.
At least they're doing something constructive with their projects for once. As fun as the empty cities might be for film makers and urban spelunkers they're otherwise a huge waste. Maybe we can get China to build a space elevator!
But labor costs! (Score:2)
Now if only they could find a source of cheap, expendable workers to mine the tunnel...
Cost Seems Low (Score:1)
The estimated replacement cost for the Tappan Zee bridge in NY is about $4B. A small bridge was replaced near me at a cost of over $100M. It seems like something of this magnitude will cost a lot more than $3B.... or it's an incredible scientific bargain at this price.
Re:Cost Seems Low (Score:4, Informative)
does it pass even casual scrutiny to think that China can make a collider of twice the size at one-third the cost?
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The tunnel's gonna need a whole lot of concrete, steel, etc. - global commodities whose cost doesn't vary that much by geography.
And don't actually cost that much.
The LHC is packed to the gills with custom components: everything from the the superconducting magnets to the RF generators to the detectors to the massive computing systems to sift through all the subatomic debris. Even assuming China has the technical expertise to create that custom componentry (a question I can't answer - I simply don't know)...
I doubt they do. And I doubt that lack of technical expertise is actually an obstacle. After all, prior to constructing the LHC, Europe didn't have that expertise either and yet all those devices got built just the same.
does it pass even casual scrutiny to think that China can make a collider of twice the size at one-third the cost?
I bet the EU could do that too. But it'd require changing how they build such things.
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I disagree: there is a decades-long history of building similar, though simpler, devices in Europe and the United States. Sure, there was a lot of invention involves and new challenges to tackle, but a lot of the fundamental technologies already existed. More importantly, there was a substantial population of people who had experience in designing such (earlier) technolog
China has no cost advantage here (Score:3)
Even assuming China has the technical expertise to create that custom component
China almost certainly has a labor force can make the gear or can hire people who can if there are specific skills needed.
does it pass even casual scrutiny to think that China can make a collider of twice the size at one-third the cost?
No. I'm a cost accountant and I can assure you that China will not enjoy any meaningful cost advantages on a project like this. China might have a minor cost advantage due to cheap labor on the digging portion of the project but it wouldn't be hugely cheaper. The biggest costs will be the gear that goes into the accelerator and China enjoys no meaningful cost advantage there. It's al
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OK, so the first LHC cost $9billion. How much would the second one cost? I'd bet a LOT less.
OTOH, this IS a new project, not a second LHC. That probably means that they'll run into new and unexpected problems. So the estimate is almost certainly wrong, and on the low end. (Not certainly. China's been doing some work with large 3D printers that print buildings, and, I believe, also tunnel construction machinery. And almost certainly on things I haven't heard about.)
But, yeah, my guess is that the pric
SSC circumfrence was to be 87 km (Score:3)
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Try the veal (Score:5, Funny)
Earthquakes? (Score:1)
Sounds cool. But, given China's perpensity to have massive earthquakes, is the building of such a large collider a wise idea? I would think a 57 mile diameter ring of superconducting, supercooled magnets and high vacuum might have some integrity and alignment issues even after a minor tremor let alone a large quake.
Circumference (Score:3)
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Earthquakes exist everywhere (Score:2)
The point the poster made, which I think is legitimate, is that even a very small earthquake could probably be catastrophic for a collider's integrity and alignment.
That's an engineering issue that would exist no matter where you built the accelerator. You think there aren't fault lines near the LHC? Fermilab's Tevatron is within the New Madrid seismic zone. There basically is no place on earth that doesn't get earthquakes from time to time. You have to engineer the device with this in mind.
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China is big. Saying China is prone to earthquakes is akin to saying the USA is prone to earthquakes.
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This is a collider of extraordinary magnitude (Score:1)
It has our gratitude.
IANAPP (I am not a particle physicist (Score:2)
The LHC created a higgs boson by colliding protons. This Chinese collider is planned (according to TFS) to collide electons and positrons. IANAPP but I am not sure that would create a higgs boson. However colliding an electon and a positron would create energy )matter and antimatter) probably in the form of gamma rays.
Whereas colliding protons and antiprotons will give of some energy in the form of neutrinos
In fact electrons and positrons are Leptons, so wouldn't this be called a Large Lepton Collider (LLC)
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One pathway for electron/positron collision can produce a neutral Z and a Higgs. In fact, they already tried that at the Large Electron Positron collider, the predecessor to the LHC. It came very close, at 115 GeV. There were hints of the Higgs, and so it came as no real surprise to find it just 10% higher.
This is actually a more efficient way of producing Higgs particles, at lower energies. The LHC produces the Higgs with two quarks, but there are six quarks involved in the proton/proton collision, so a lo
We should act quickly! (Score:5, Funny)
I wish them the best... but (Score:3)
Just one thing though: if you are going to go to the trouble to build such a big and expensive machine, why not build a linear collider? I realize it would take more land, but I'm sure they have it and the science would be even better. Correct me if I am wrong, but after the second refit of the LHC, isn't the next big international European science project going to be a big honking linear collider? At that point, it won't matter that China's collider is bigger, you can get more interesting results from a gigantic linear collider. Although the idea of a super-proton collider does tickle me a bit.
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As an American, I hope we get in on the action.
After consistently screwing China out of collaboration for decades I can't see that happening. They are building their own space station because you wouldn't let them co-operate on the ISS.
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Pay people to dig holes, then fill them (Score:2)
They have hundreds of millions of single men which they need to keep employed.
Good thing the US is mortgaging its future to keep China together today.
US STEM Efforts in 2028 (Score:3)
Good luck with that (Score:3)
LEP operated around 209 GeV in 27Km so this Chinese proposal of 240 GeV at 52Km is.. underwhelming. Realize things like labor cost less in China but this isn't a high rise they are making. LHC cost amost $5B to build. Where is China getting the magnets? I'm not sure US export controls will allow a sale. And then there are those pesky detectors which are technological marvels themselves.
Still unfortunate that we can't scale up anti-proton production to levels necessary for high luminosity.
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I doubt that China could build the magnets in use now at LHC on their own and certainly you will need at least that much for a super proton/proton collider.
Can you really compare the sophistication/complexity of Atlas/CMS or even D0/CDF to neutrino dectors?
Does China have the systems capabilities to handle the data output of these types of experiments?
The biggest problem China faces is they are not likely to get much help from western governments due to the technology transfer aspects.
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interesting, thanks
Will It Cook? (Score:2)
Mmmmm (Score:2)
But it's going to be built by a ... GOVERNMENT!!! (Score:2)
It can't work. I mean, no collider or supercollider can work, if they're built by a GOVERNMENT! Only private industry can build a working one...*
Oh, that's right, all of them were build by governments. No company's going to do it, because there's no ROI, or if there is, it may not be for decades....
mark
* Satire of libertarians, for libertarians, and others who aren't familiar with satire....
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Better be satire, because that is factually incorrect, there are industrial colliders, a subset of the thirty thousand of commercial particle accelerators in the world, government owned ones are 3% of the total.
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correct, they instead actually create wealth and improve quality and length of human life
interesting list is known subatomic particles vs. those actually used in practical application. For example antiproton, muon, and pion have been used commercially.
Electrons? (Score:2)
A ring for electrons? I thought that was impossible at those energies.
a good thing (Score:2)
I think we'd all rather see a world where China competes with the west in science and technology.
I am a scientist and I complain a lot about corruption in funding, publishing, and public representation of science; but as a whole it's a very honest and productive enterprise. This is much better than competing to see who can maintain the lowest cost labor pool or the biggest weapons.
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Is not small! Asian collider is good size! Girlfriend say so!
LEP was 209 GeV (Score:3)
That makes me wonder if the planned energy is enough for a useful Higgs factory. The ILC [wikipedia.org] is supposed to do 500 GeV and would work well as a Higgs factory. That proposal would be more than twice as expensive though.
It's of course possible the article
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There was a largest collider competition towards the end of the cold war. Hard to say if CERN was part of it but the LHC did get some parts cheap due to the other projects being cancelled.
Data beyond the standard model (Score:3)
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As soon as people stop wanting power & control?
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You've been hiding under a rock for forty years if you don't know what those white flags on the Brooklyn bridge mean.
What's a Brooklyn bridge?
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" if you don't know what those white flags on the Brooklyn bridge mean."
Don't we have to wait til Bridget Anne Kelly or David Wildstein publishes their memoirs?
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It would be easier to build a ring around the earth. Bonus is that the vacuum can easily be established
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Inside a typical accellerator, the vacuum is typically about one-millionth of an atmosphere. At an alltitude of roughly 100 km., the air density is about 1/2,200,000 the density at the surface. That's obviously good enough,, but at that altitude drag still brings orbiting objects down to earth quite quickly. The quick rule of thumb is to have something up there long enough to be useful, minimum orbital altitude is about 300 Km. So yeah, vacuum is the least of your obstacles - you'll have more than you'll ev
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still it is meaningless to just fixate on diameter, energy of beam and type of particle(s) are the relevant parameters for determining what kind of useful physics can be done