Large Hadron Collider-The World's Most Powerful Particle Accelerator

▪ 2009

      On Sept. 10, 2008, scientists of the European Organization for Nuclear Research ( CERN), Geneva, ran the first test operation of what had been described as the largest machine and the most ambitious scientific experiment ever built—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For the test the scientists successfully guided beams of subatomic particles around a ringlike structure that was about 27 km (17 mi) in circumference and formed the heart of the collider. The structure was located in an underground circular tunnel that CERN had originally built for an earlier particle accelerator called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (1989–2000). The tunnel lay beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva at a depth of 50–175 m (165–575 ft).

      The LHC was designed to send two beams of hadrons (protons and other particles that are composed of quarks) in opposite directions around the ringlike structure. Initially, protons (hydrogen nuclei) would be used, but later experiments were planned with heavy ions such as lead nuclei, which consist of protons and neutrons. Within the LHC the particles traveled in channels evacuated to a higher vacuum than that of deep space and cooled to within two degrees of absolute zero. During full-scale operation, the particles would be accelerated to speeds within one-millionth of a percent of the speed of light. At four points in the tunnel, the paths of the particles intersected so that some of the particles would crash into each other and produce large numbers of new particles. Huge magnets weighing tens of thousands of tons and banks of detectors would collect and record the particles produced at each collision point. Under maximum power, collisions between protons would take place at a combined energy of up to 14 trillion electron volts—about seven times greater than had been achieved previously by any other particle accelerator.

      The LHC project took a quarter of a century to realize. Planning began in 1984, and in 1994 CERN's governing body gave the final go-ahead for the project. Many thousands of scientists and engineers from dozens of countries were involved in designing, planning, and building the LHC, and the cost of its construction was more than $5 billion. The first full-scale operation of the LHC had been scheduled for late 2008 but was postponed in order to investigate and repair a leak that developed in the collider's helium cooling system because of an electrical malfunction.

      One goal of the LHC project was to understand the fundamental structure of matter by re-creating the extreme conditions that, according to the big bang theory, occurred in the first few moments of the universe. (The high energy involved had led some critics to contend that the LHC might create a small black hole that could destroy the Earth, but safety reviews by scientists refuted such concerns and concluded that the collider would not produce anything that had not already been produced by high-energy cosmic-ray collisions in the atmosphere.) For decades physicists had used the so-called standard model to describe the fundamental particles that make up matter. The model had worked well but had weaknesses. First, and most important, it did not explain why some particles have mass. In the 1960s British physicist Peter Higgs postulated a type of particle that interacts with other particles to provide their mass. Higgs particles had never been observed, but it was expected that they could be produced in the very high energy collisions of the LHC. Second, the standard model required some arbitrary assumptions, which some physicists had suggested might be resolved by postulating a new class of supersymmetric particles—these particles might also be produced by the collisions in the LHC. Finally, examination of asymmetries between particles and their antiparticles might provide a clue to another mystery: the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe.

      As with all groundbreaking experiments, the most exciting results might be unexpected ones. In British physicist Stephen Hawking's view, “It will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show that something is wrong and we need to think again.”

David G.C. Jones

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