Dancing in the dark: The search for the 'missing Universe'. LHC restart: 'We want to break physics'. Collider hopes for a 'super' restart. LHC scientists to search for 'fifth force of Nature'. Higgs boson spills secrets as LHC prepared for return. No small undertaking: the experiments occupy huge subterranean caverns. Sound and fury? Image source, SPL. Why do we need a 27km tunnel for smashing particles together at almost the speed of light? Eye opener. The massive engineering challenge posed by the collider has already produced spin-offs.
Long view. Related Topics. Particle physics Large Hadron Collider. Published 24 March Published 16 March Published 5 March Published 15 February Some links may take you there. If you can't find what you're looking for, try ukri.
Learn about getting involved at CERN. Following an upgrade, the LHC now operates at an energy that is 7 times higher than any previous machine! The LHC allows scientists to reproduce the conditions that existed within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang by colliding beams of high-energy protons or ions at colossal speeds, close to the speed of light.
This was the moment, around During these first moments all the particles and forces that shape our Universe came into existence, defining what we now see. The LHC is exactly what its name suggests - a large collider of hadrons any particle made up of quarks. Particles are propelled in two beams going around the LHC to speeds of 11, circuits per seconds, guided by massive superconducting magnets! These two beams are then made to cross paths and some of the particles smash head on into one another.
However, the collider is only one of three essential parts of the LHC project. The other two are:. The LHC is truly global in scope because the LHC project is supported by an enormous international community of scientists and engineers.
Working in multinational teams all over the world, they are building and testing equipment and software, participating in experiments and analysing data. The UK has a major role in the project and has scientists and engineers working on all the main experiments. In the UK, engineers and scientists at 20 research sites are involved in designing and building equipment and analysing data. British staff based at CERN has leading roles in managing and running the collider and detectors.
Eventually this connection will be welded together so that the beams are contained within the beam pipes. What is the LHC? The CERN accelerator complex is a succession of machines with increasingly higher energies. Each machine accelerates a beam of particles to a given energy before injecting the beam into the next machine in the chain. This next machine brings the beam to an even higher energy and so on. The LHC is the last element of this chain, in which the beams reach their highest energies.
The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes — two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. Below a certain characteristic temperature, some materials enter a superconducting state and offer no resistance to the passage of electrical current. The accelerator is connected to a vast distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.
What are the main goals of the LHC? What is the origin of mass? The Standard Model does not explain the origins of mass, nor why some particles are very heavy while others have no mass at all. Particles that interact intensely with the Higgs field are heavy, while those that have feeble interactions are light.
In the late s, physicists started the search for the Higgs boson, the particle associated with the Higgs field. However, finding it is not the end of the story, and researchers have to study the Higgs boson in detail to measure its properties and pin down its rarer decays.
Will we discover evidence for supersymmetry? The Standard Model does not offer a unified description of all the fundamental forces, as it remains difficult to construct a theory of gravity similar to those for the other forces. Supersymmetry — a theory that hypothesises the existence of more massive partners of the standard particles we know — could facilitate the unification of fundamental forces.
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