Large Hadron Collider

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"LHC" redirects here. For the pop group, see Les Horribles Cernettes

Template:Hadron colliders The Large Hadron Collider (short LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is funded and being built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from 34 countries, universities and laboratories. It is currently under construction, and scheduled to start operation in 2007, when it will become the world's largest particle accelerator. The LHC will collide hadrons (protons, to be exact) in the 27 km circumference tunnel previously used by the LEP, an electron-positron collider. The protons used will have an energy of 7 TeV each (total collision energy of 14 TeV), that means, that each proton will have the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito. Five experiments will be built to utilize the LHC. Two of them, ATLAS and CMS are large, "general purpose" particle detectors. The other three (LHCb, ALICE, and TOTEM) are smaller and more specialized.

The LHC can also be used to collide heavy ions such as Lead (Pb) (collision energy will be 1150 TeV).

Physicists hope to use the collider to enhance their ability to answer the following questions:

Is the popular Higgs Boson theory, which provides an explanation of the origin of elementary particles' mass, violated?
Will the more precise measurements of the masses of baryons continue to be mutually consistent within the standard model?
Do supersymmetric ("SUSY") particles exist?
Why are there violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?
Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?
What is the nature of the 95% of the universe's mass which is unaccounted for by current astronomical observations?

The size of the LHC constitutes a unique engineering challenge with unique safety issues. While running, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ, and in the beam, 725 MJ. Loss of only 10⁻⁷ of the beam is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet, while the beam dump must discharge an energy equivalent to a considerable concentration of explosives.

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