The Large Hadron Collider
Episode #9 of the course “Most ambitious science projects”
The Large Hadron Collider was intended to be a proton accelerator used to discover the evasive God particle. Positioned over 330 feet (~100 m) beneath the border of Switzerland and France, the Large Hadron Collider is the biggest particle collider in the world.
The facility depends on 700 gigawatt-hours of energy and more than $1 billion to run annually. Over 10,000 scientists, engineers, and students representing 60 countries on six continents perform work for the LHC’s six continuous projects, which were created to release the secret fundamentals of physics from the universe’s vast unknown.
Uses for Sciences
Is there an exact definition for dark matter? Do more dimensions exist in space than we know? Does the Higgs boson, known as the God particle, actually exist? Under what circumstances was the universe created? The LHC’s six-particle detector tracks and visualizes the identities, energies, and paths of subatomic particles. This information may assist in answering a few of these questions.
For example, the ATLAS project’s detector is looking for impact events during which there seems to be unbalanced momentum. This imbalance is an indication that the supersymmetric particles are present. These are believed to comprise dark matter. The Compact Muon Solenoid project serves as a complement process to ATLAS by trying to find supersymmetry and the storied Higgs boson. LHC-Forward is going to assist in creating high-energy cosmic rays, and LHC-Beauty aims to yield information concerning the reason the universe consists of matter instead of antimatter. TOTEM keeps track of proton collisions and gives data on the inner structure of the proton. Finally, ALICE will keep track of quark-gluon plasmas, which are akin to research projects at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
Uses for Practical Life
The LHC has helped black-hole alarmists out of obscurity. But the research carried out there will have an insignificant impact on our everyday living—unless, of course, you have family and friends who enjoy discussing how the universe was formed in the beginning during holiday gatherings.
Share with friends