Revision as of 15:57, 2 April 2008

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and hadron collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (46°14′N 6°03′E / 46.233°N 6.050°E / 46.233; 6.050). It is currently in the final stages of construction, and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to its final operating temperature of ~4 K (−269 °C). The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and 'missing links' in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify the three fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.

Technical design

The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider.

The 3.8 metre diameter, concrete-lined tunnel crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although the majority of its length is inside France. The collider itself is located underground, with many surface buildings holding ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.

The collider tunnel contains two pipes enclosed within superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium, each pipe containing a proton beam. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Additional magnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between them will take place. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes.

The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. It will take around ninety microseconds for an individual proton to travel once around the collider. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be "bunched" together into approximately 2,800 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than twenty-five nanoseconds apart. When the collider is first commissioned, it will be operated with fewer bunches, to give a bunch crossing interval of seventy-five nanoseconds. The number of bunches will later be increased to give a final bunch crossing interval of twenty-five nanoseconds.

Prior to being injected into the main accelerator, the particles are prepared through a series of systems that successively increase the particle energy levels. The first system is the linear accelerator Linac2 generating 50 MeV protons which feeds the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB). Protons are then injected at 1.4 GeV into the Proton Synchrotron (PS) at 26 GeV. Finally the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) can be used to increase the energy of protons up to 450 GeV.

The LHC can also be used to collide heavy ions such as lead (Pb) with a collision energy of 1,150 TeV. The ions will be first accelerated by the linear accelerator Linac 3, and the Low-Energy Injector Ring (LEIR) will be used as an ion storage and cooler unit. The ions are then further accelerated by the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

Six detectors are being constructed at the LHC. They are located underground, in large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points. Two of them, ATLAS and CMS, are large, "general purpose" particle detectors. ALICE is a large detector designed to search for a quark-gluon plasma in the very messy debris of heavy ion collisions. The other three (LHCb, TOTEM, and LHCf) are smaller and more specialized. A seventh experiment, FP420 (Forward Physics at 420 m), has been proposed which would add detectors to four available spaces located 420 m on either side of the ATLAS and CMS detectors.

The size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique safety issues. While running, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ, and in the beam 725 MJ. Loss of only 10 of the beam is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet, while the beam dump must absorb an energy equivalent to a typical air-dropped bomb. For comparison, 725 MJ is equivalent to the detonation energy of approximately 157 kilograms (346 lb) of TNT, and 10 GJ is about 2.5 tons of TNT.

Research

When in operation, about seven thousand scientists from eighty countries will have access to the LHC, the largest national contingent of seven hundred being from the United States. Physicists hope to use the collider to test various grand unified theories and enhance their ability to answer the following questions:

• Is the popular Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model realised in nature? If so, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses?
• Will the more precise measurements of the masses of the quarks continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?
• Do particles have supersymmetric ("SUSY") partners?
• Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter? See also CP-violation.
• Are there extra dimensions indicated by theoretical gravitons, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?
• What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?
• Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces?

As an ion collider

The LHC physics program is mainly based on proton-proton collisions. However, shorter running periods, typically one month per year, with heavy-ion collisions are included in the programme. While lighter ions are considered as well, the baseline scheme deals with lead (Pb) ions. This will allow an advancement in the experimental programme currently in progress at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

Proposed upgrade

After some years of running, any particle physics experiment typically begins to suffer from diminishing returns; each additional year of operation discovers less than the year before. The way around the diminishing returns is to upgrade the experiment, either in energy or in luminosity.

A luminosity upgrade of the LHC, called the Super LHC, has been proposed, to be made after ten years of LHC operation. The optimal path for the LHC luminosity upgrade includes an increase in the beam current (i.e., the number of protons in the beams) and the modification of the two high luminosity interaction regions, ATLAS and CMS. To achieve these increases, the energy of the beams at the point that they are injected into the (Super) LHC should also be increased to 1 TeV. This will require an upgrade of the full pre-injector system, the needed changes in the Super Proton Synchrotron being the most expensive.

Cost

The construction of LHC was originally approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs, with another 210 million francs (140 M€) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (300 M€) in the accelerator, and 50 million francs (30 M€) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget pushed the completion date out from 2005 to April 2007. 180 million francs (120 M€) of the cost increase has been the superconducting magnets. There were also engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid. The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between $5 and $10 billion.

LHC@Home

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.

Safety concerns

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Concerns have been raised that performing collisions at previously unexplored energies might unleash new and disastrous phenomena. These include the production of micro black holes, and strangelets. Such issues were raised in connection with the RHIC accelerator, both in the media and in the scientific community; however, after detailed studies, scientists reached such conclusions as "beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet" and that there is "powerful empirical evidence against the possibility of dangerous strangelet production."

One simple argument against such fears is that collisions at these energies (and higher) have been happening in nature for billions of years apparently without hazardous effects, as ultra-high-energy cosmic rays impact Earth's atmosphere and other bodies in the universe. A concern against this cosmic-ray argument is that, if dangerous strangelets or micro black holes were created at LHC, a proportion would have less than the Earth's escape velocity (of 11.2km/s), and therefore would be captured by the Earth's gravitational field, whereas those created by high-energy cosmic rays would leave the planet at high speed, due to the laws of conservation of momentum at relativistic speeds. Yet again, countering this fear, is the argument that if such micro-black holes or stranglets were in fact dangerous, and were created by cosmic-ray interactions with the Earth, then they should also have been created in huge numbers in the Sun, stars, planets, and ISM, so that the Universe would be filled with them (many cosmologically Doppler-shifted to lower energy), and traveling at all speeds — in which case stars and planets (including the Earth) ought to be constantly capturing them and thus being devoured, which is not observed .

CERN's review concludes, after detailed analysis, that "there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from strangelets, black holes, or monopoles. However, the concern about the verity of Hawking radiation was not addressed, and another study was commissioned by CERN in 2007 for publication on CERN's web-site by the end of 2007.

The risk of a doomsday scenario was indicated by Sir Martin Rees, with respect to the RHIC, as being a one in fifty million chance, and by Professor Frank Close, with regards to (dangerous) strangelets, that 'the chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession'.. Accurate assessments of these risks are impossible due to the currently incomplete, or even hypothetically flawed, standard model of particle physics (see also a list of unsolved problems in physics).

Micro Black Holes

Although the Standard Model of particle physics predicts that LHC energies are far too low to create black holes, some extensions of the Standard Model posit the existence of extra spatial dimensions, in which it would be possible to create micro black holes at the LHC at a rate on the order of one per second. According to the standard calculations these are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation. The concern from opposing civil society movements is that, among other disputed factors, Hawking radiation (which is still debated) is not yet an experimentally-tested or naturally observed phenomenon. Thus, the above mentioned opponents to LHC consider that micro black holes produced in a terrestrial laboratory might not decay as rapidly as calculated, or might even not be prone to decay and, if unable to rapidly evaporate, they could start interacting, grow larger and potentially be disastrous to Earth itself.

Strangelets

Strangelets are a hypothetical form of strange matter that contains roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks and are more stable than ordinary nuclei. If strangelets can actually exist, and if they were produced at LHC, they could conceivably initiate a runaway fusion process (reminiscent of the fictional ice-nine) in which all the nuclei in the planet were converted to strange matter, similar to a strange star.

Legal Challenge

On 21st March 2008 a complaint requesting an injunction against the LHC's startup was filed before the US District Court of Hawaii by a group of seven concerned individuals. This group includes Walter L. Wagner who notably was unable to obtain an injunction against the much lower energy RHIC for similar concerns. See: RHIC - Fears among the public

The restraining order is a demand for an injunction of 4 months time after issuance of the LHC Safety Assessment Group's (LSAG) Safety Review originally promised by January 1, 2008 and way overdue, to review the LHC's most recent safety documentation, after it has been issued, and a permanent injunction until the LHC can be demonstrated to be reasonably safe within industry standards.

Construction accidents and delays

On October 25, 2005, a technician, José Pereira Lages, was killed in the LHC tunnel when a crane load was accidentally dropped.

On March 27, 2007, there was an incident during a pressure test involving one of the LHC's inner triplet magnet assemblies provided by Fermilab and KEK. No people were injured, but a cryogenic magnet support broke. Fermilab director Pier Oddone stated 'In this case we are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces.' This fault had been present in the original design, and remained during four engineering reviews over the following years. Analysis revealed that its design, made as thin as possible for better insulation, was not strong enough to withstand the forces generated during pressure testing. Details are available in a statement from Fermilab, with which CERN is in agreement.

Repairing the broken magnet and reinforcing the eight identical copies used by LHC, in addition to a number of other small delays, caused a postponement of the planned November 26, 2007 startup date to May 2008.

See also

• International Linear Collider
• Superconducting Super Collider
• Tevatron

Notes and references

1. The CERN Bulletin - A word from the DG: The home straight
2. ^ Achenbach, Joel (2008-03-01). "The God Particle". National Geographic Magazine. National Geographic Society. ISSN 0027-9358. Retrieved 2008-02-25.
3. Ellis, John (19 July 2007). "Beyond the standard model with the LHC". Nature. 448: 297–301. doi:10.1038/nature06079. Retrieved 2007-11-24. There are good reasons to hope that the LHC will find new physics beyond the standard model, but no guarantees. The most one can say for now is that the LHC has the potential to revolutionize particle physics, and that in a few years' time we should know what course this revolution will take.
4. I.F. Ginzburg, A. Schiller, “Search for a heavy magnetic monopole at the Fermilab Tevatron and CERN LHC”, Phys. Rev. D57 (1998) 6599-6603, arXiv:hep-ph/9802310; A. Angelis et al., "Formation of Centauro and Strangelets in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions at the LHC and their Identification by the ALICE Experiment”, arXiv:hep-ph/9908210; G. L. Alberghi, et al., “Searching for micro black holes at LHC”, IFAE 2006, Incontri di Fisica delle Alte Energie (Italian Meeting on High Energy Physics)
5. T. Lari, "Search for Supersymmetry with early ATLAS data"
6. Symmetry magazine, April 2005
7. CERN - LEP: the Z factory
8. FP420 R&D Project
9. "...in the public presentations of the aspiration of particle physics we hear too often that the goal of the LHC or a linear collider is to check off the last missing particle of the standard model, this year’s Holy Grail of particle physics, the Higgs boson. The truth is much less boring than that! What we’re trying to accomplish is much more exciting, and asking what the world would have been like without the Higgs mechanism is a way of getting at that excitement." -Chris Quigg, Nature's Greatest Puzzles
10. Ions for LHC
11. PDF presentation of proposed LHC upgrade
12. Maiani, Luciano (16 October 2001). "LHC Cost Review to Completion". CERN. Retrieved 2001-01-15.
13. Feder, Toni (2001). "CERN Grapples with LHC Cost Hike". Physics Today. 54 (12): 21. Retrieved 2007-01-15. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
14. New Scientist, 28 August 1999: "A Black Hole Ate My Planet"
15. Horizon: End Days, an episode of the BBC television series Horizon
16. W. Wagner, "Black holes at Brookhaven?" and reply by F. Wilzcek, Letters to the Editor, Scientific American July 1999
17. A. Dar, A. De Rujula, U. Heinz, "Will relativistic heavy ion colliders destroy our planet?", Phys. Lett. B470:142-148 (1999) arXiv:hep-ph/9910471
18. W. Busza, R. Jaffe, J. Sandweiss, F. Wilczek, "Review of speculative 'disaster scenarios' at RHIC", Rev. Mod. Phys.72:1125-1140 (2000) arXiv:hep-ph/9910333
19. Safety at the LHC
20. J. Blaizot et al, "Study of Potentially Dangerous Events During Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC", CERN library record CERN Yellow Reports Server (PDF)
21. Tiny Black Holes - Physicist Dave Wark of Imperial College, London reporting for NOVA scienceNOW
22. Cf. Brookhaven Report mentioned by Rees, Martin (Lord), Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?, U.K., 2003, ISBN 0-465-06862-6; note that the mentioned "1 in 50 million" chance is disputed as being a misleading and played down probability of the serious risks (Aspden, U.K., 2006)
23. BBC 'End Days' (Documentary) - available from the BBC, or from Youtube.
24. CERN courier - The case for mini black holes. Nov 2004
25. American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News, Number 558, September 26, 2001, by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon
26. S. Dimopoulos and G. Landsberg, "Black holes at the LHC", Phys. Rev. Lett. 87:161602 (2001), arXiv:hep-ph/0106295
27. List of a few known civil society movements expressing concerns at their websites on LHC destructive risks: Risk Evaluation Forum, LHC Concerns, Stop CERN, LHC Legal Defense Fund
28. A. Helfer, "Do black holes radiate?", Rept. Prog. Phys. 66, 943-1008 (2003) arXiv:gr-qc/0304042
29. Cf. the previous websites on concerns about the LHC, from civil society movements upon reference.
30. Federal District Court Filings and Dockets Hawaii
31. MSNBC Cosmic Log - Doomsday Fear Sparks Lawsuit
32. List of affidavits and temporary restraining order
33. Hewett, JoAnne (25 October 2005). "Tragedy at CERN" (Blog). Cosmic Variance. Retrieved 2007-01-15. author and date indicate the beginning of the blog thread
34. "Message from the Director-General" (Press release) (in English and French). CERN. 26 October 2005. Retrieved 2007-01-15.{{cite press release}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
35. Fermilab 'Dumbfounded' by fiasco that broke magnet
36. LHC Magnet Test Failure
37. Updates on LHC inner triplet failure
38. "The God Particle". www.bbc.com. Retrieved 2007-05-22.
39. "CERN announces new start-up schedule for world's most powerful particle accelerator" (Press release). CERN. 2007-06-22. Retrieved 2007-07-01.

External links

• LHC - The Large Hadron Collider webpage
• Overview of the LHC at CERN's public webpage
• Challenges in Accelerator Physics
• LHC UK webpage
• US LHC webpage
• UK Science Museum, London Exhibition supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council
• The Alice experiment
• Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Main Page
• Compact Muon Solenoid Page (U.S. Collaboration)
• LCG - The LHC Computing Grid webpage
• The Large Hadron Collider ATLAS Experiment - Virtual Reality (VR) photography panoramas (requires QuickTime)
• LHC startup plan. Includes dates, energies and luminosities
• Seed short film - Lords of the Ring
• 'Super-collider' tunnel nears completion The Independent 1 March 2008
• LHC Defense Fund - Anti-LHC organization

Articles

• Energising the quest for 'big theory'
• symmetry magazine LHC special issue
• BBC Horizon, The six billion dollar experiment
• New Yorker: Crash Course. The world’s largest particle accelerator (ca. 6 500 words)
• NYTimes: A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions (ca. 4 300 words)
• Beam Parameters and Definitions. The chapter of the LHC Technical Design Report (TDR) that lists of all the beam parameters for the LHC.

• Articles needing expert attention from March 2008
• Particle physics facilities
• E-Science
• Cyberinfrastructure
• Large Hadron Collider