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| (Image retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.htm |
The Machine you see in the above picture worth about 6
billion US dollars and it is the most sophisticated experimental equipment so
far. The picture show only a fraction of the whole LHC and the circumference of
this huge machine is 27 km. LHC is
located near Geneva in Switzerland. It is built by CERN(European organisation
for nuclear research) yet it’s the final product of more than 10000 scientists
and engineers around the world. It is truly
a triumph in human history as well as science. I’m going to share some
interesting facts that I found on web about this magnificent machine and at the
end of the article there is a link to a BBC documentary on this machine and the
links to the web sites I’ve taken these information.
LHC is a particle accelerator. The main objective of
the LHC is to discover new particles and
understand the sub atomic world and it’s behaviour. One of the major
achievement of LHC was the discovery of a particle called Higgs Boson that was
predicted by the standard model. (Standard model is something like the periodic
table of particle physics which categories and describes the elementary
particles.)The discovery of the particle was announced in July 2012.It was like
the holy grail of particle physics and physicist Peter Higgs theorized and
predicated the existence of the particle. Some call this particle “The God
particle” since physicists use this particle to explain how other particles got
their mass by using something called Higgs mechanism. LHC was able to discover this particle first and it was one of it’s
main objective. Studying the structure of space and time, other elementary
particles and the interrelationship of general relativity and quantum mechanics
were some other objectives.
LHC Detectors
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(An image of a collision, Scientists do analysis on these in
order to study particles)
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One of the main
component of the LHC is it’s four main detectors. They are used to collect data
from the collisions that occur by smashing two protons almost at the speed of light. Two of the main detectors (ATLAS and
CMS) are general purpose detectors and other two detectors (ALICE and LHCb) got
some specific tasks to carry on.
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Detector
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Tasks
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ATLAS
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General purpose detector. it’s being used to study the origin of mass
and study of extra dimensions.
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CMS
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General purpose detector. It’s being used to detect Higgs and study
the nature of dark matter.
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ALICE
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Special purpose
detector. ALICE is studying a "fluid" form of matter called quark–gluon plasma that
existed shortly after the Big
Bang.
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LHCb
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Equal amounts of matter
and antimatter were
created in the Big Bang. LHCb will try to investigate what happened to the
"missing" antimatter.
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Analysing Data
The detectors in LHC produce huge amount of data that needed
to be analysed in order to extract what they want. So there is a huge computer
grid called The LHC computer grid
consisting of 140 computer centres spread through 35 countries.LHC generally
produce about 25 petabytes per year and this consume lot of computing power
from this grid.LHC computing grid became the largest computing grid as in 2012.
Some interesting facts about LHC
- · The LHC has 920 magnets which are run by super conductors. Their temperature while in operation is -271.3C
- · The protons that are used are accelerated up to 99.999% of the speed of light.
- · Inside the LHC there is a vacuum as almost empty as outer space. It’s there to stop the high energy particles getting hit by air molecules and loose their energy.
- · The collisions of photons create temperatures 100000 times hotter than the surface of the sun for a fractions of a second.
- · More than 10000 scientists and engineers work on LHC who represent more than 60 countries in the world.
Does LHC really worth it’s price?
As I mentioned earlier ,this experiment’s initial cost was 6
billion US dollars. So we can have some idea about how much costs actually. So
I believe that people have a right to question the feasibility of this project
in return to human race. In my opinion every experiment is worthy because it
never ends with a null results. it may help us to prove some idea, hypothesis is correct ,or it may
turn upside down the hypothesis we tried to check and show us something we
never expected. It’s the nature of experiments and it keeps science
progressing. As we all know LHC was able to discover the Higgs Boson and it
proved it’s existence. In future it may be able to answer some of the
fundamental questions about our nature and these discoveries will lead us to
discover more useful things.
Some may ask can we
expect something that is really useful
to all humans, not just for scientists, multinational companies or military.
It’s too early to tell something for sure but LHC is currently conducting
experiments on anti matter and those scientists will be able to understand and manipulate it this discovery could revolutionize the energy
sector of our civilization by providing unlimited supply of pure energy. we
should not be too optimistic about these possibilities because in early 20
century if somebody said that we can
harness energy from by exploding atoms or combining them, society will
consider him or her as an daydreamer. There are major problems like poverty,
war and conflicts, global warming that our world facing right now and we have
to solve them as quick as possible but if we are intending to overcome them by
cutting funds or terminating the projects like LHC it’s not the correct way and
the results could be much worse.
Future of LHC
LHC is the biggest and the most powerful particle
accelerator we have today. but it’s not strong enough to give more details
about the sub atomic world. It would require much powerful machine. It’s a bit
funny that we need largest and strongest apparatus to look into the smallest
constituents of reality. So scientists are now getting ready to build the
predecessor of LHC,VLHC(very large hadron collider).it’s just a bigger version
of the LHC but scientists speculate that it would show the atomic world in much
more detail. This machine would be 4 times larger than LHC and scientists are
hoping to finish this giant before they retire LHC in 2035.Expected collision
energy is 100 Tev and the estimated building cost is around 10 billion US
dollars. VLHC is just a proposal so far but we can expect that it will become
true within our life time and it will help us to understand and appreciate the
universe we live in.
Good thorough article. Are there any other giant experiments similar to LLC these days? We had big NASA projects in the past which seems quite rare these days.
ReplyDeleteFermi lab is the second biggest particle accelerator which does things very similar to LHC.It was the competitor of LHC in search of Higgs Boson(The God particle.).Scientists are just beginning to find the answers to some of the most fundamental things in universe and we might be living in an era where the next paradigm shift could happen. NASA is facing huge loses of fundings in nowadays and we might not see a big thing from them quite a while but NASA next biggest objective is to sent man to Mars in near future.
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