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Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will be the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built when it turns on in 2007. It will operate in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference, between France’s Jura mountains and Switzerland’s Lake Geneva. Experiments at the LHC will give scientists their first view of the Terascale energy region.
The LHC will accelerate two beams of particles in opposite directions, smashing them together to create showers of new particles via Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. Colliding beams of protons will generate some 800 million collisions per second.
Superconducting magnets will guide the beams around the ring. Each proton flying around the LHC will have an energy of 7 Tera electron volts to give a proton-proton collision energy of 14 TeV. The protons contain quarks and gluons, each carrying a fraction of the proton’s total energy. A typical collision involves a quark or gluon from each proton colliding at lower energy, accompanied by debris from the remaining parts of the protons. The composite nature of the proton complicates the detection of the collision products.
Four major particle detectors – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – will observe the collisions. ATLAS and CMS, each with over 2000 collaborators, will survey all aspects of the Terascale. LHCb will concentrate on precise measurement of matter-antimatter asymmetry. ALICE, using LHC’s ability to accelerate lead ion beams in addition to protons, will study matter at extreme energy densities.
The LHC experiments will record about 1000 Gigabytes of data every day. Particle physicists are working with computer scientists around the world to develop new grid networking technology. This will link thousands of computers worldwide to create a global computing resource to store and process the deluge of data from the LHC.
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