The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator housed in a 27km circular tunnel underneath the border between France and Switzerland. The instrument allows scientists to smash protons together at extremely high speeds and it is hoped that this will tell them more about what happened in the first moments after the Big Bang. Experiments here may also demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle which is postulated to confer mass to other particles.
When on 30 March 2010, the accelerator began colliding protons together with a total energy of 7,000 billion electon volts, it became the most powerful particle collider ever.
Image: Installation of the silicon tracking detector in the CMS experiment (credit: CERN)
Reporting from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, David Shukman finds out what scientists hope the experiment will tell them.
The Large Hadron Collider, constructed in tunnels below Geneva, is the world's largest particle accelerator. Scientists using the LHC will recreate conditions less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.
Coordinates: 46°14′N 06°03′E / 46.233°N 6.05°E / 46.233; 6.05
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 1998 to 2008, with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics and high-energy physics, and particularly for the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry. The LHC is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature. It contains six detectors each designed for specific kinds of exploration.
The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. Its synchrotron is designed to collide opposing particle beams of either protons at up to 7 teraelectronvolts (7 TeV or 1.12 microjoules) per nucleon, or lead nuclei at an energy of 574 TeV (92.0 µJ) per nucleus (2.76 TeV per nucleon-pair). It was built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
On 10 September 2008, the proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time, but 9 days later operations were halted due to a magnet quench incident resulting from an electrical fault. The following helium gas explosion damaged over 50 superconducting magnets and their mountings, and contaminated the vacuum pipe. On 20 November 2009 they were successfully circulated again, with the first recorded proton–proton collisions occurring 3 days later at the injection energy of 450 GeV per beam. On 30 March 2010, the first collisions took place between two 3.5 TeV beams, setting the current world record for the highest-energy man-made particle collisions, and the LHC began its planned research program.
The LHC will operate at 4 TeV per beam until the end of 2012, 0.5 TeV higher than 2010 and 2011. It will then go into shutdown for 20 months for upgrades to allow full energy operation (7 TeV per beam), with reopening planned for late 2014.
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