For over 30 years, the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider (BEPC) and its 2008 upgrade (BEPC II) have produced the majority of accurate measurements in the fields of charm physics, a branch of particle physics that studies charm quarks, making the city one of the world's leading forces in particle collider projects.

Completing its first successful collision in 1988, the BEPC was China's first mega-science facility and high-energy accelerator. It is currently the only collider in the world operating in the 2 to 5 billion electron volt energy range.

According to scientists working with Beijing Spectrometer III (BSE III), the main detector for the BEPC II, the spectrometer can process 6,000 valid particle collision cases per second. 

The spectrometer collects hundreds of terabytes of data from particle collisions each year, and the data processing work often takes more than 10,000 central processors working simultaneously. Then, after about a year of calibration work, these data are made available to over 500 researchers from 16 countries and 84 institutes for subsequent studies.

The BSE III boasts China's largest international collaboration team in the field. The team has published more than 500 scientific papers using data from the particle collider facility and its detector. 

The collaboration team has also contributed over 1,000 measurements on the world's most credible list of particles. 

The BSE III is expected to have another upgrade in 2024. This will mark yet another milestone in physics, said a scientist working with the team.

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