Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator ever built. CERN built the LHC between 1998 and 2008. The LHC is 100 meters underground in a tunnel on the border between France and Switzerland. The tunnel has a 27-kiometer ring of superconducting magnets with some accelerating devices that boost the energy of the two proton beams before they collide to provide data about high-energy physics.

Quotes

• The fundamental scientific purpose of the LHC is to explore the inner structure of matter and the forces that govern its behavior, and thereby understand better the present content of the Universe and its evolution since the Big Bang, and possibly into the future. The unparalleled high energy of the LHC, which is designed to be 7 TeV per proton in each colliding beam, and its enormous collision rate, which is planned to attain about a billion collisions per second, will enable the LHC to examine rare processes occurring at very small distances inside matter. It will be a microscope able to explore the inner structure of matter on scales an order of magnitude smaller than any previous collider. The energies involved in the proton-proton collisions will be similar to those in particle collisions in the first trillionth of a second of the history of the Universe. By studying these processes in the laboratory, the LHC experiments will, in a sense, be looking further back into time than is possible with any telescope.
  • John Ellis, "The Fundamental Physics Behind the LHC". The Large Hadron Collider: a Marvel of Technology The Fundamental Physics Behind the LHC. EPFL Press. 2009. pp. 22–37. ISBN 978-2-940222-34-6.  (edited by Lyndon Evans; quote from p. 23)

• … The Higgs discovery relied not on the detection of photon pairs with a certain energy but on the detection of more of those pairs than expected. That reliance on probabilities is why the L.H.C. and other major collider experiments often have independent teams, working with separate detectors, analyzing the same types of collisions—to avoid biasing each other. It is also the reason for the five-sigma threshold.
  • Alex Hutchinson (June 17, 2015)"What to Expect from the Large Hadron Collider". The New Yorker.

• With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the next burning question at the LHC is why its mass is so low. Nobody knows the answer to that question, but it is definitely the next hot topic for LHC physicists ...
  • Don Lincoln, "Preface". The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014. p. viii. ISBN 978-1-4214-1351-8. 

• On July 4, scientists working with data from ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of a new particle "consistent with" the Higgs boson — a subatomic particle also colloquially referred to as the "God particle." After years of design and construction, the LHC first sent protons around its 27 kilometer (17 mile) underground tunnel in 2008. Four years later, the LHC's role in the discovery of the Higgs boson provides a final missing piece for the Standard Model of Particle Physics — a piece that may explain how otherwise massless subatomic particles can acquire mass. Gathered here are images from the construction of the massive $4-billion-dollar machine that allowed us peer so closely into the subatomic world.
  • Alan Taylor, (July 6, 2012)"The Fantastic Machine That Found the Higgs Boson". The Atlantic. (34 photographs)

See also

• Collider

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia
• Facts and Figures about the LHC. CERN.