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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

The collider is currently undergoing commissioning while being cooled down to its final operating temperature of approximately 1.9 K (−271.25 °C). Initial particle beam injections were successfully carried out between 8-11th August 2008, the first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire LHC is scheduled for September 10 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on October 21 2008.

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 three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. 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.

Concerns have been raised about the safety of the LHC on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the collider might cause disastrous events, including the production of stable micro black holes (mBHs) and strangelets. Several CERN-commissioned reports and subsequently published research papers have corroborated the safety of the LHC particle collisions. One research paper published on August 10, 2008 reaches the opposite conclusion, stating that "at the present stage of knowledge there is a definite risk from mBHs production at colliders." This researcher also suggests several steps that might reduce this risk.

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 3.8 metre diameter, concrete-lined tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider. It crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although most of it is in France. Surface buildings hold ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.

The collider tunnel contains two adjacent beam pipes, each containing a proton beam (a proton is one type of hadron). The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1232 bending magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 focusing magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at the operating temperature, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature.

The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. It will take less than 90 microseconds for a proton to travel once around the main ring. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be "bunched" together, into 2,808 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 ns apart. When the collider is first commissioned, it will be operated with fewer bunches, to give a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns. The number of bunches will later be increased to give a final bunch crossing interval of 25 ns.

Prior to being injected into the main accelerator, the particles are prepared by a series of systems that successively increase their energy. The first system is the linear accelerator Linac 2 generating 50 MeV protons, which feeds the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB). There the protons are accelerated to 1.4 GeV and injected into the Proton Synchrotron (PS), where they are accelerated to 26 GeV. Finally the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is used to increase their energy to 450 GeV before they are at last injected into the main ring, where proton bunches are accumulated, accelerated to their peak 7 TeV energy, and finally stored for many hours while collisions occur at the four intersection points.

The LHC will also be used to collide lead (Pb) nuclei with a collision energy of 1,150 TeV. The Pb 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 then will be further accelerated by the Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) before being injected into LHC ring, where they will reach an energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon.

Six detectors are being constructed at the LHC, located underground in large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points. Two of them, the ATLAS experiment and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), are large, "general purpose" particle detectors. A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) is designed to study the properties of quark-gluon plasma from the debris of heavy-ion collisions. The other three, (LHCb, TOTEM, and LHCf), are smaller and more specialized.

Research

When in operation, about seven thousand scientists from eighty countries will have access to the LHC. 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 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 total cost of the project is anticipated to be between €3.2 to €6.4 billion. The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs (€1.6 billion), with another 210 million francs (€140 million) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (€300 million) for the accelerator, and 50 million francs (€30 million) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007. 180 million francs (€120 million) of the cost increase have been due to the superconducting magnets. There were also engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid. In part this was due to faulty parts lent to CERN by fellow laboratories Argonne National Laboratory or Fermilab (home to the Tevatron, the world's largest particle accelerator until CERN finishes the Large Hadron Collider).

Computing resources

The LHC Computing Grid is being constructed to handle the massive amounts of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider. It incorporates both private fibre optic cable links and existing high-speed portions of the public Internet, to get data from CERN to academic institutions around the world.

The distributed computing project LHC@home 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 of particle collisions

Concerns have been raised regarding the safety of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles.

In response to these concerns, the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, performed a safety analysis of the LHC and concluded in a report published in 2003 that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat". In 2008, drawing from new experimental data and theoretical understanding, the LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) published a report updating the 2003 safety review, in which they reaffirmed and extended its conclusions that LHC particle collisions present no danger. The LSAG report was reviewed and endorsed by CERN’s Scientific Policy Committee (SPC), a group of external scientists that advises CERN’s governing body, its Council.

Two subsequent research papers have corroborated the safety of the LHC particle collisions. In an article published on August 10, 2008, one researcher concluded that "at the present stage of knowledge there is a definite risk from mBHs production at colliders."

On 21 March, 2008, a complaint requesting an injunction to halt the LHC's startup was filed by a group of seven concerned individuals against CERN and its American collaborators, the US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, before the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii. Following the publication of the LSAG report, the US Government called for summary dismissal of the suit against the government defendants.

Operational safety

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Large Hadron Collider" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2008)

The size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique safety issues on account of the huge energy stored in the magnets and the beams.

While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ, which is the equivalent of 2.4 tons of TNT or the heat from the burning of 300 litres (80 gallons) of petrol.

Meanwhile, the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ. This is equivalent to the detonation energy of 173 kilograms (381 lb) of TNT, and could be compared to the kinetic energy of a TGV (French high-speed train) running at 222 km/h (139 mph).

Loss of only one ten-millionth part (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. These immense energies are even more impressive when one considers how little matter is carrying it. Under nominal operating conditions (2808 bunches per beam, 1.15×10 protons per bunch), the beam pipes contain 1.0×10 grams of hydrogen, which, in standard conditions for temperature and pressure, would fill the volume of one grain of fine sand.

Construction accidents and delays

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

On March 27, 2007 a cryogenic magnet support broke during a pressure test involving one of the LHC's inner triplet (focusing quadrupole) magnet assemblies, provided by Fermilab and KEK. No one was injured. 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 assemblies used by LHC delayed the startup date, then planned for November 2007, by several weeks. Initial testing of LHC abilities is scheduled to take place on August, 9th in CERN labs.

In popular culture

The Large Hadron Collider has been featured in a number of novels, including Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer and Decipher by Stel Pavlou, which described it in some detail. One of the most visible examples is Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, which involves dangerous antimatter created at the LHC used as a weapon against the Vatican. CERN published a "Fact or Fiction?" page discussing the accuracy of the book's portrayal of the LHC, CERN, and particle physics in general. The movie version of the book had footage filmed on-site at one of the experiments at the LHC; the director, Ron Howard, also met with CERN experts in an effort to make the science in the story more accurate. Kate McAlpine, aka "alpinekat", a science writer working at CERN, wrote the lyrics for a personal rap video about the LHC called the "The Large Hadron Rap". BBC4 Radio will be broadcasting "Big Bang Day" on September 10 to coincide with LHC being switched on. Included in this event will be a radio episode of the BBC show Torchwood with a plot surrounding the LHC. A novel was published in Italy detailing an accident in the LHC with the creation of a black hole which would create the final apocalypse of our planet. Although it is a novel, it contains some basic facts about particle physics, along with less well established matters such as as ghosts and oriental lore.

On August 27th, 2008, website released an article titled "5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World". Three of those experiments, including "Recreating the Big Bang", "Creating Strange Matter", and even "Time Travel", all require the use of the LHC.

See also

• Higgs mechanism
• International Linear Collider
• Standard model
• LHC@home

Notes and references

1. ^ Achenbach, Joel (2008-03-01). "The God Particle". National Geographic Magazine. National Geographic Society. ISSN 0027-9358. Retrieved 2008-02-25.
2. "LHC synchronization test successful". CERN bulletin.
3. ^ Overbye, Dennis (July 29, 2008). "Let the Proton Smashing Begin. (The Rap Is Already Written.)". The New York Times.
4. ^ CERN press release, August 7 2008
5. "Large Hadron Collider to be launched Oct. 21 - Russian scientist". RIA Novosti.
6. 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.
7. 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)
8. T. Lari, "Search for Supersymmetry with early ATLAS data"
9. ^ Boyle, Alan (March 27, 2008). "Doomsday Fears Spark Lawsuit". Cosmic Log. msnbc.
10. ^ Boyle, Alan (August 19, 2008). "Twists in the Doomsday debate". Cosmic Log. msnbc.com.
11. ^ "The safety of the LHC". CERN 2008 (CERN website).
12. ^ Blaizot JP, Iliopoulos J, Madsen J, Ross G, Sonderegger P, Specht H (2003). Study of Potentially Dangerous Events During Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC. CERN. Geneva. CERN-2003-001.
13. ^ LHC Safety Assessment Group (Ellis J, Giudice G, Mangano ML, Tkachev I, Wiedemann U) (2008). Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions. Abstract. arXiv:0806.3414.
14. ^ LHC Safety Assessment Group (Ellis J, Giudice G, Mangano ML, Tkachev I, Wiedemann U) (2008). Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions: Addendum on Strangelets.
15. ^ Giddings SB, Mangano ML (2008). Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes. CERN. Geneva. CERN-PH-TH/2008-025. arXiv:0806.3381v1.
16. Koch B, Bleicher M, Stöcker H (July 22, 2008). Exclusion of black hole disaster scenarios at the LHC. (PDF) arXiv:0807.3349.
17. ^ Peskin, Michael (2008). The end of the world at the Large Hadron Collider?. (PDF)
18. ^ Plaga, Rainer (August 10, 2008). On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders. (PDF) arXiv:0808.1415v1.
19. Symmetry magazine, April 2005
20. "CERN - LEP: the Z factory".
21. LHC Guide booklet
22. LHC commissioning with beam, May 2008
23. "...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
24. "Ions for LHC".
25. "PDF presentation of proposed LHC upgrade" (PDF).
26. Maiani, Luciano (16 October 2001). "LHC Cost Review to Completion". CERN. Retrieved 2001-01-15.
27. 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)
28. Overbye, Dennis. (June 21, 2008). "Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say". The New York Times.
29. Muir, Hazel. (March 28, 2008). "Particle smasher 'not a threat to the Earth'". NewScientist.com news service.
30. CERN Scientific Policy Committee (2008). SPC Report on LSAG Documents. Abstract.
31. Koch B, Bleicher M, Stöcker H (July 22, 2008). Exclusion of black hole disaster scenarios at the LHC. (PDF) arXiv:0807.3349.
32. Federal District Court Filings and Dockets Hawaii
33. Overbye, Dennis. (June 27, 2008). "Government Seeks Dismissal of End-of-World Suit Against Collider". The New York Times.
34. "Beam Parameters and Definitions" (PDF).
35. 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
36. "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)
37. "Fermilab'Dumbfounded'by fiasco that broke magnet".
38. "LHC Magnet Test Failure".
39. "Updates on LHC inner triplet failure".
40. "The God Particle". www.bbc.com. Retrieved 2007-05-22.
41. "Angels and Demons". CERN. Retrieved 2008-07-16.
42. Perkins, Ceri. "ATLAS gets the Hollywood treatment". ATLAS e-News. CERN. Retrieved 2008-07-16.
43. "Programming for Big Bang Day on BBC Radio 4". BBC Press Office. Retrieved 2008-08-11.
44. Angelo Paratico "Black Hole" Mursia, Milano 2008 http://www.mursia.com/romanzi_mursia/black%20hole.html
45. "5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World". Cracked.com. Retrieved 2008-08-27.

External links

• Official website
• Lyndon Evans and Philip Bryant (editors) (2008-08-14), "LHC Machine", Journal of Instrumentation, 3 (S08001), doi:10.1088/1748-0221/3/08/S08001, retrieved 2008-08-26 {{citation}}: |author= has generic name (help). Full documentation for design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors in about 1600 pages.
• LHC UK webpage
• US LHC webpage
• Official Timeline of LHC Milestones
• Hardware Commissioning Coordination web pages
• TED talks (video) - Brian Cox: What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider
• Overview of the LHC at CERN's public webpage
• Challenges in accelerator physics
• UK Science Museum, London Exhibition supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council
• The Alice experiment
• Compact Muon Solenoid 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
• VR Image of the Supercollider

Articles

• Energising the quest for 'big theory'
• symmetry magazine LHC special issue August 2006, special issue December 2007
• 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.
• Large Hadron Collider, Ingenia magazine
• Birth of a Giant, CNRS magazine

• Particle physics facilities
• E-Science
• Large Hadron Collider