A marvel of modern particle physics that has enabled researchers to plumb the depths of reality, the Large Hadron collider is the world's largest particle collider. In 2012 the massive atom smasher, a 27 kilometer underground ring on the border of France and Switzerland, allowed researchers to find evidence for the famous Higgs boson and has since led to many other discoveries.
According to a 2015 history paper by physicist Thomas Sch, Sir John Adams, the former director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), suggested building an underground tunnel that could accommodate a particle accelerator in 1977.
The project was approved 20 years later in 1997 and construction began on the ring that could smash particles up to 99% the speed of light. Within the ring, 9,300 magnets guide packets of charged particles in two opposite directions at a rate of 11,245 times a second, finally bringing them together for a head-on collision. The facility is capable of creating around 600 million collisions every second, emitting incredible amounts of energy and exotic heavy particles every once in a while. The previous record-holding particle collider, the Tevatron in the U.S., operated at energies 6.5 times higher.
$531 million of the $8 billion cost of the LHC came from the United States. Scientists from 60 different countries work on its experiments. The design intensity of the beams was only ten millionth of it's original design. It switched on again on April 22, 2022, with higher power and double the collision rate, after being off for upgrades. The goal is to increase the energy of the collision to a record breaking 13.6 TeV.
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There were fears that the new atom smasher would destroy Earth and create a black hole. Any physicist would say that the worries are not true.
The Director General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Robert Aymar, previously told Live Science that any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.
The facility could potentially be harmful if used wrong. If you stuck your hand in the beam, which focuses the energy of an aircraft carrier in motion down to a width of less than a millimeter, it would make a hole in it and the radiation in the tunnel would kill you.
The last 10 years have seen the smashing of atoms together for the two main experiments of the LHC, which operate and analyze their data separately. This is to make sure that neither collaboration is influencing the other and that each provides a check on their sister experiment. More than 2,000 scientific papers have been generated by the instruments.
On July 4, 2012 the scientific world watched as the final piece in the Standard Model of physics was discovered. The Standard Model tries to account for all particles and forces. Peter Higgs wrote a paper in 1964 about how mass arises in the universe.
Every particle that moves through the field is dragged on by it. The larger the particles, the slower they move through the field. Physicists have been chasing after this field for half a century. This elusive quarry was specifically built to be captured by the LHC. The discovery of the Higgs had 125 times the mass of a protons, and Peter and Francois were awarded the prize for predicting its existence.
Physicists still have some holes in the Standard Model even with the Higgs in hand. It doesn't deal with gravity, which is covered by Einstein's theories of relativity. It doesn't explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, which should have been created in roughly equal amounts at the beginning of time. It is completely silent on dark matter and dark energy, which had yet to be discovered when it was first created.
Many researchers would have said that the next great theory is supersymmetry, which adds more massive twin partners to all known particles. One or more of these heavy partners could have been a perfect candidate for dark matter. Supersymmetry begins to explain why gravity is weaker than the other three fundamental forces. The Standard Model predicted that the boson would be slightly different than it actually is.
The Standard Model said it would be in the mass range. Physicists have no good leads to go on after this great achievement for the Standard Model. Some have begun to talk about the lost decades chasing down theories that didn't correspond to actual observations. Many are hoping that the next data-taking runs will clear up some of the mess.
After shutting down in December of last year, the LHC went through two years of repairs. The plan to restart the facility was delayed because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The cutting edge of particle physics was to be explored once more on April 22, 2022. Live Science reported that the giant collider ring is now more powerful than ever. The number of collisions per second will be doubled by the accelerator, which will be able to smash atoms together with a slight increase in energy.
For the first time ever, data from previous runs of the LHC has been used to spot ghosts inside the machine, mysterious primordial particles from the dawn of time, and a strange pattern that can't be explained.
FASER and SND@LHC are two new experiments that will come online in the new run. Physicists will look for physics beyond the Standard Model with these experiments inside the LHC.
There is already talk of an even more powerful particle accelerator to replace it, located in the same area but four times the size. It could take 20 years and $27 billion to replace it.
The article was updated on April 25, 2022.
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