The Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets built underground on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It sends two beams of protons in opposite directions around the ring at close to the speed of light and collides them at four points, where detectors including ATLAS and CMS record what the collision produces. Approved in 1994 and built through the 1990s and 2000s as a multinational CERN project with no single inventor, it achieved first beam on 10 September 2008; a magnet fault nine days later forced over a year of repairs before collisions resumed in November 2009. It is the instrument that produced the collisions in which the Higgs boson was first observed in 2012.
Facts
Invented Year2008 is the year of first beam, not an invention date: the collider was designed and built collectively by CERN over roughly a decade and credited to no single inventor, the same honest-null choice this atlas's institution entries make for founder wherever no one person founded the body. MeasuresCollision products of proton and lead-ion beams, used to study the Higgs boson, dark matter and matter-antimatter asymmetry. 2 Operating PrincipleTwo beams travel in opposite directions at near light speed through separate pipes, guided by superconducting magnets and accelerated by radiofrequency cavities, then steered into collision at four points around the ring where particle detectors record the results. 2 Operating Range13.6 TeV nominal proton-proton collision energy (6.8 TeV per beam), 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair for lead-ion collisions, a ring circumference of 26,659 meters, with magnets operated at 1.9 kelvin. 2 Open Questions
ResolutionNot stated as a single figure for the accelerator itself; resolution at the LHC is a property of its individual detectors, such as ATLAS and CMS, rather than of the collider ring.
No resolution figure applies to the collider as a whole. Retry without SourceSlug after ambiguous duplicate citation rejection (FactQueueId 852). Classification
Instrument ClassSourced to the subject's own account Connections
Operated By
Source Large Hadron Collider (CERN)
Used In
Source The Higgs Boson (CERN)
Source Large Hadron Collider (CERN)
Sources
1. Large Hadron Collider (Wikipedia)
Wikipedialead
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.
Lede, instrument class
The Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets built underground on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
View the Source 2. Large Hadron Collider (CERN)
CERNPhysics section
the nature of dark matter
CERN LHC home page
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.
Facts and figures
13.6 TeV...26 659 m...1.9 K (-271.3 degrees C)
- Used In: Physics
View the Source The Higgs Boson (CERN)
Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
The Large Hadron Collider Is Not Really a Machine, It Is a Collaboration
The subject of this lens: the collider itself, its build history and the 2012 Higgs boson observation.
Read the EssayFrequently Asked Questions
Has the Large Hadron Collider actually found anything new?
Yes, most notably the Higgs boson, first observed in 2012.
Yes. It was the Large Hadron Collider's own collisions, recorded by the ATLAS and CMS detectors, that produced the first observation of the Higgs boson in 2012, decades after the particle was first theorized.
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