Description
The Higgs boson, discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), plays a central role in the Standard Model. Measuring its properties precisely will advance our understandings of some of the most important questions in particle physics, such as the naturalness of the electroweak scale and the nature of the electroweak phase transition. The Higgs boson could also be a window for exploring new physics, such as dark matter and its associated dark sector, heavy sterile neutrino, et al. The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), proposed by the Chinese High Energy community in 2012, is designed to run at a center-of-mass energy of 240 GeV as a Higgs factory. With about one million Higgs bosons produced, many of the major Higgs boson couplings can be measured with precisions about one order of magnitude better than those achievable at the High Luminosity-LHC. The CEPC is also designed to run at the Z-pole and the W pair production threshold, creating close to one trillion Z bosons and 100 million W bosons. It is projected to improve the precisions of many of the electroweak observables by about one order of magnitude or more. These measurements are complementary to the Higgs boson coupling measurements. The CEPC also offers excellent opportunities for searching for rare decays of the Higgs, W, and Z bosons. The large quantities of bottom-quarks, charm-quarks, and tau leptons produced from the decays of the Z bosons are interesting for flavor physics. The clean collision environment also makes the CEPC an ideal facility to perform precision QCD measurements. Several detector concepts have been proposed for the CEPC. Dedicated simulation and R&D program confirm these concepts can fulfill the CEPC physics requirements.
In this document, we provide a brief summary of the physics potential and the detector design concepts, both of which are laid out in detail in the Conceptual Design Report (CDR) released in November 2018. We also outline future directions and challenges. In the Addendum, we briefly describe the planning and the international organization of the CEPC. The next step for the CEPC team is to perform detailed technical design studies. Effective international collaboration would be crucial at this stage. This submission for consideration by the ESPP is part of our dedicated effort in seeking international collaboration and support. Given the importance of the precision Higgs boson measurements, the ongoing CEPC activities do not diminish our interests in participating in the international collaborations of other future electron-positron collider based Higgs factories.
