The LHC, baby you know me!

Greetings!

On the 10th of September, 2008, several people were convinced that the world would end at the hands of a science experiment gone wrong. Being that it is the 20th of September, obviously Earth did not fall down the vortex of a microscopic black hole or implode in on itself. The science experiment- a massive machine lying in an underground tunnel on the French-Swiss border- is arguably the most ambitious and complex machine, let alone science project, in the history of human kind.

The project is called the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for short and because several other colliders exist already, you may have heard of a particle collider before. The LHC, however, is much different from any other collider due to several truly staggering statistics:

1. The machine is housed in an underground tunnel with a depth ranging anywhere from 150-400 feet with a circumference of 17 miles!
2. The construction took well over a decade using components from super advanced electronic measuring devices and cameras to the installation of over 1600 bus sized superconductor "quadrapole" magnets.
3. A coalition of over 33 countries including the U.S., contributing man power, various expertise, and above all money.
4. The price tag? (get ready for this) 11 billion U.S. dollars, including $531 million invested from the U.S. itself

You may now be asking yourself, "What does this $11 billion machine do?" A particle collider's (also referred to as particle accelerators) purpose is simply what the name suggests- to collide particles. I will not try to go into technical details as I haven't the slightest knowledge about anything more than he basics (and if I try to cite the mathematics and the science that goes into building and operating one of these things my head really hurts). In LHC's case, the machine's purpose is to recreate the first (and I am not making this up) one one-thousandth of a billionth of a second after the big bang.

Obviously this isn't your standard question, easy answer routine. How do scientists go about finding ways to recreate the big bang and how does the LHC achieve that? The question is answered by looking as several processes the LHC goes through when powered up. First, scientist shoot many, many protons acquired from helium molecules through several complexes of small rings to get the protons speed nearly equal to that of the speed of light. After that, the protons are then transferred over the the main ring (keep in mind that this ring is 17 miles around) and shot around at 99.97% of the speed of light. With some simple math applied, this speed means that the proton particles are making over 11,000 rotations each second! To achieve a particle collision another beam of particles is shot in the opposite direction. Both beams cross paths and collide at controlled and highly monitored intersections. For this experiment to work correctly the entire ring must be super cooled to a temperature very near absolute zero (in simple terms about -450.00 degrees F).

The September 10th test shot only one beam of protons in one direction to test the LHC and its components. The first schedule collision test is set for the 21st of October.


What will we find? No one can say for sure. Scientist largely speculate that an elusive particle called the Higgs Boson- a temporary particle that gives matter mass, will be seen for the first time. Other predictions on what the LHC will find range from microscopic black holes that will suck up the earth to finding theoretical dark matter. And what if we don't find anything? Scientist working on the project say that would be more fascinating then anything we could find. Guess we will just have to wait and see.

Reporting from the French-Swiss border
Chad Waite

P.S. For any further information I highly recommend going to wikipedia and searching for LHC