The Large Hadron Collider

The large hadron collider is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. With a tunnel of 27km in circumference and 175m deep, it is located beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva. With build starting around 1998 and finishing in 2008 having cost around $10billion, it now provides over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities space to carry out research.

My post on the LHC will be touching upon the type of research carried out in the labs and the physics behind it. Having initially focus research into the possible existence of Higgs boson, the LHC now also allows research into hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, and test different theories in particle physics.

Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams (many hydrogen protons) travel in opposite directions in separate beams at the speed of light before they are controlled to collide. The LHC has the two tubes as ultrahigh vacuums as it is important to avoid the test particles to come in contact with any gas molecules.

The beams are controlled by superconducting electromagnets as they travel around the pipe which allows these collisions to happen more frequently. However, these electromagnets require chilling to 271.3°C to efficiently conduct electricity without any loss of energy or resistance.

When the two particles are accelerated around and eventually collide, pair production occurs. Pair production only happens if there is enough energy to produce the masses of the particles as the energy produced from the collision creates equal amounts of matter and antimatter. However, the particle produced will have a certain quantity, and to preserve these quantities, the corresponding antiparticle can only be produced. For example, when two protons are fired with large amounts of kinetic energy towards each other, a high amount of energy will be produced at the point of impact and this energy will be converted into more particles. If the energy is converted into an extra proton, an antiproton will also be produced.

As for the initial research focus of Higgs boson, this was due to an initial hypothesis in which Higgs mechanism made accurate predictions. To confirm this hypothesis, it was crucial for the discovery of the Higgs boson. However, this would prove difficult as detecting Higgs bosons required high amounts of energy to produce and even if there was sufficient energy it would be very rare to produce. Thanks to the Particle colliders, detectors, and computers, there was enough resources capable of looking for Higgs bosons and by March 2013, the existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed and this led to the acceptance of Higgs mechanism.

This link – https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-Large-Hadron-Collider?page=1 provides an overview of the timeline of discoveries and progress of the LHC

 

References:

https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-does-an-experiment-at-the-large-hadron-collider-work-42846

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson