Large Hadron Collider

Beneath breathtaking alpine vineyards, some 20 miles outside Geneva, 8,000 scientists are working at a feverish pace to complete the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, nicknamed the "Lord of Rings," which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Its purpose is to replicate the birth of the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider Project was approved by CERN Council in December 1994. Because of initial funding difficulties it was proposed initially as a 2-phase project, the first stage with an energy of 10 TeV in the center-of-mass, to be operational by 2004, with an upgrade to its final energy of 14 TeV by 2008.

During the years 1995-1996, intense negotiations with non-Member States secured a substantial commitment to participate financially in the construction of the Machine. Consequently, in December 1996, Council passed a Resolution approving the construction of the 14 TeV accelerator in a single stage. The LHC will be the first machine built at CERN with substantial material contribution from non-Member States. Machine hardware is being constructed in National Laboratories in Canada, India, Japan, Russia and the USA.

The LHC will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV . Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with a collision energy of 1150 TeV.

A TeV is a unit of energy used in particle physics. 1 TeV is about the energy of motion of a flying mosquito. What makes the LHC so extraordinary is that it squeezes energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito.

The experiments will be carried out deep inside the earth in a circular tunnel 27 kilometers long, 100 meters below the surface of the Earth, where CERN physicists will crash sub-atomic particles whirring around at the speed of light and monitor the debris of these tiny crashes, to calibrate the relationship between matter and energy and learn more about how matter came into existence in the first few seconds of the Big Bang.

The ultimate prize is to find an almost particle, the Higgs-Boson, a key part of what physicists call the Standard Model of the subatomic world. CERN's Large Hadron Collider will be supplied with protons from the injector chain Linac2 - Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB) - Proton Synchrotron (PS) - Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). These accelerators were upgraded to meet the very stringent needs of the LHC.

The tunnel was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider. The underground infrastructure of LEP included experimental areas at four points, each incorporating experimental and service caverns, plus an equipment cavern with injection tunnels connected to allow particle transfer from the SPS machine. Plus additional galleries parallel to the main tunnel were used to house klystrons and their power supplies. On the surface a total of 37 buildings housed all the necessary equipment and services for the LEP machine and experimental operations. The LEP-2 upgrade consisted essentially of the addition of two sets of galleries thus allowing a doubling of the number of klystrons and related power supplies.

For the LHC project, the existing LEP tunnel has been re-used after the complete dismantling of the LEP machine. In addition new structures have been added including experimental and service caverns destined to accommodate two new experiments two transfer tunnels of about 2.5 km each in length and beam dump facilities comprising two sets of straight tunnels and caverns. 32 new surface buildings of various sizes have also been constructed.

LHC@Home, a distributed computing project, was started to support the construction and calibration of the LHC. The project uses the BOINC platform to simulate how particles will travel in the tunnel. With this information, the scientists will be able to determine how the magnets should be calibrated to gain the most stable "orbit" of the beams in the ring.

While many have voiced concerns that the LHC will destroy the Universe, engineers close to the project admit that the possibility is infinitesimally small. As CERN has pointed out, if the Earth were in danger of any such fate, it would have happened billions of years ago from the bombardment of protons the planet receives that are millions of times more energetic than anything that could be produced by the LHC.

The Large Hadron Collider is expected to create tiny black holes within the Earth. However there exists an entirely theoretical phenomenon known as Hawking Radiation, which some physicists expect to cause these black holes to dissipate. The primary cause for concern is the fact that Hawking Radiation - the only means by which these black holes could be dissipated, is entirely theoretical.

CERN performed a study to investigate whether such dangerous events as micro black holes, strangelets, or magnetic monopoles could occur. The report concluded, "We find no basis for any conceivable threat". It has been claimed that a strong argument for the safety of colliders such as the LHC comes from the simple fact that cosmic rays with energies up to twenty million times the LHC's 1.4×10¹³ eV capacity have been bombarding the Earth, Moon and other objects in the solar system for billions of years with no such effects. Yet CERN themselves claim that the Hadron Collider is to recreate conditions that haven't existed since a fraction of a second after the big bang, making it difficult to accept that the conditions within the collider are quite as everyday.

As with any new and untested experiment, it is not possible to say with utter certainty what will happen. John Nelson at the University of Birmingham stated of RHIC that "it is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk-but I could not prove it." Furthermore, in academia there is some question, albeit among a minority of scientists, of whether the Hawking radiation theory is correct.

Souces: Daily Galaxy, CERN, Wikipedia