The definition of the Large Hadron Collider is as follows: the LHC is an accelerator of charged particles, and it was created with the purpose of accelerating heavy ions and protons of lead, and studying the processes that occur when they collide. But why is this necessary? Does this pose any danger? In this article we will answer these questions and try to understand why the Large Hadron Collider is needed.
What is BAK
The Large Hadron Collider is a huge ring-shaped tunnel. It looks like a large pipe that disperses particles. The LHC is located under the territory of Switzerland and France, at a depth of 100 meters. Scientists from all over the world took part in its creation.
The purpose of its construction:
- Find the Higgs boson. This is the mechanism that gives particles mass.
- Study of quarks - these are fundamental particles that are part of hadrons. That is why the name of the collider is “hadron”.
Many people think that the LHC is the only accelerator in the world. But this is far from true. Since the 50s of the 20th century, dozens of similar colliders have been built around the world. But the Large Hadron Collider is considered the largest structure, its length is 25.5 km. In addition, it includes another accelerator, smaller in size.
Media about LHC
Ever since the creation of the collider, a huge number of articles have appeared in the media about the dangers and high cost of the accelerator. The majority of people believe that the money is wasted; they cannot understand why they should spend so much money and effort searching for some particle.
- The Large Hadron Collider is not the most expensive scientific project in history.
- The main goal of this work is the Higgs boson, for the discovery of which the drone collider was created. The results of this discovery will bring many revolutionary technologies to humanity. After all, the invention of the cell phone was also once greeted negatively.
Operating principle of the tank
Let's look at what the work of a hadron collider looks like. It collides beams of particles at high speeds and then monitors their subsequent interactions and behavior. As a rule, one beam of particles is first accelerated on the auxiliary ring, and after that it is sent to the main ring.
Inside the collider, particles are held in place by many strong magnets. Since the collision of particles occurs in a fraction of a second, their movement is recorded by high-precision instruments.
The organization that operates the collider is CERN. It was she who, on July 4, 2012, after huge financial investments and work, officially announced that the Higgs boson had been found.
Why is the LHC needed?
Now it is necessary to understand what the LHC gives to ordinary people, and why the hadron collider is needed.
Discoveries related to the Higgs boson and the study of quarks may eventually lead to a new wave of scientific and technological progress.
- Roughly speaking, mass is energy at rest, which means that in the future it is possible to convert matter into energy. And, therefore, there will be no problems with energy and the possibility of interstellar travel will appear.
- In the future, the study of quantum gravity will make it possible to control gravity.
- This makes it possible to study in more detail the M-theory, which claims that the universe includes 11 dimensions. This study will allow us to better understand the structure of the Universe.
About the far-fetched danger of the hadron collider
As a rule, people are afraid of everything new. The Hadron Collider also raises their concerns. Its danger is far-fetched and is fueled in the media by people who do not have a natural science education.
- Hadrons collide in the LHC, not bosons, as some journalists write, scaring people.
- Such devices have been operating for many decades and do not harm, but benefit science.
- The idea of high-energy proton collisions that could produce black holes is refuted by the quantum theory of gravity.
- Only a star 3 times the mass of the sun can collapse into a black hole. Since there are no such masses in the solar system, there is nowhere for a black hole to arise.
- Due to the depth at which the collider is located underground, its radiation does not pose a danger.
We learned what the LHC is and what the hadron collider is for, and we realized that we shouldn’t be afraid of it, but rather wait for discoveries that promise us great technical progress.
Just a few years ago, I had no idea what hadron colliders were, the Higgs Boson, and why thousands of scientists around the world were working on a huge physics campus on the border of Switzerland and France, burying billions of dollars in the ground.
Then, for me, like many other inhabitants of the planet, the expression Large Hadron Collider, the knowledge about elementary particles colliding in it at the speed of light and about one of the greatest discoveries of recent times - the Higgs Boson, became familiar.
And so, in mid-June, I had the opportunity to see with my own eyes what so many people are talking about and what there are so many conflicting rumors about.
This was not just a short excursion, but a full day spent at the world's largest nuclear physics laboratory - Cern. Here we were able to communicate with the physicists themselves, and see a lot of interesting things in this scientific campus, and go down to the holy of holies - the Large Hadron Collider (but when it is launched and tests are being carried out in it, any access from the outside to it is impossible) , visit the factory for the production of giant magnets for the collider, the Atlas center, where scientists analyze data obtained in the collider, secretly visit the newest linear collider under construction and even, almost like in a quest, practically walk along the thorny path of an elementary particle, from the end to the beginning. And see where it all begins...
But about all this in separate posts. Today it's just the Large Hadron Collider.
If this can be called simply, my brain refuses to understand HOW something like this could be first invented and then built.
2. Many years ago this picture became world famous. Many believe that this is the Large Hadron in section. In fact, this is a cross-section of one of the largest detectors - CMS. Its diameter is about 15 meters. This is not the largest detector. The diameter of Atlas is about 22 meters. 
3. To roughly understand what it is and how big the collider is, let’s look at the satellite map.
This is a suburb of Geneva, very close to Lake Geneva. This is where the huge CERN campus is based, which I will talk about separately a little later, and there are a bunch of colliders located underground at various depths. Yes Yes. He's not alone. There are ten of them. The Large Hadron simply crowns this structure, figuratively speaking, completing the chain of colliders through which elementary particles are accelerated. I will also talk about this separately, going along with the particle from the Large (LHC) to the very first, linear Linac.
The diameter of the LHC ring is almost 27 kilometers and it lies at a depth of just over 100 meters (the largest ring in the picture).
The LHC has four detectors - Alice, Atlas, LHCb and CMS. We went down to the CMS detector. 
4. In addition to these four detectors, the rest of the underground space is a tunnel in which there is a continuous gut of blue segments like these. These are magnets. Giant magnets in which a crazy magnetic field is created, in which elementary particles move at the speed of light.
There are 1734 of them in total. 
5. Inside the magnet is such a complex structure. There is a lot of everything here, but the most important thing is two hollow tubes inside in which proton beams fly.
In four places (in those same detectors) these tubes intersect and proton beams collide. In those places where they collide, protons scatter into various particles, which are detected by detectors.
This is to briefly talk about what this nonsense is and how it works. 
6. So, June 14, morning, CERN. We arrive at an inconspicuous fence with a gate and a small building on the territory.
This is the entrance to one of the four detectors of the Large Hadron Collider - CMS.
Here I want to stop a little to talk about how we managed to get here in the first place and thanks to whom.
And it’s all “to blame” for Andrey, our man who works at CERN, and thanks to whom our visit was not some short boring excursion, but incredibly interesting and filled with a huge amount of information.
Andrey (he in the green T-shirt) never minds guests and is always happy to facilitate a visit to this Mecca of nuclear physics.
You know what's interesting? This is the throughput mode in the Collider and at CERN in general.
Yes, everything is using a magnetic card, but... an employee with his pass has access to 95% of the territory and facilities.
And only those with an increased level of radiation danger require special access - this is inside the collider itself.
And so, employees move around the territory without any problems.
For a moment, billions of dollars and a lot of the most incredible equipment have been invested here.
And then I remember some abandoned objects in Crimea, where everything has long been cut out, but, nevertheless, everything is mega-secret, under no circumstances can you be filmed, and the object is who knows what strategic.
It’s just that people here think adequately with their heads. 
7. This is what the CMS territory looks like. No show-off exterior decoration or super-cars in the parking lot. But they can afford it. There's just no need. 
8. CERN, as the world's leading scientific center in the field of physics, uses several different directions in terms of PR. One of them is the so-called “Tree”.
Within its framework, school physics teachers from different countries and cities are invited. They are shown and told here. Then the teachers return to their schools and tell their students about what they saw. A certain number of students, inspired by the story, begin to study physics with great interest, then go to universities to major in physics, and in the future, perhaps even end up working here.
But while the children are still in school, they also have the opportunity to visit CERN and, of course, go down to the Large Hadron Collider.
Several times a month, special “open days” are held here for gifted children from different countries who are in love with physics.
They are selected by the very teachers who were at the base of this tree and submit proposals to the CERN office in Switzerland.
Coincidentally, on the day we came to see the Large Hadron Collider, one of these groups from Ukraine came here - children, students of the Small Academy of Sciences, who had passed a difficult competition. Together with them, we descended to a depth of 100 meters, into the very heart of the Collider. 
9. Glory with our badges.
Mandatory items for physicists working here are a helmet with a flashlight and boots with a metal plate on the toe (to protect their toes when a load falls) 
10. Gifted children who are passionate about physics. In a few minutes their places will come true - they will descend into the Large Hadron Collider 
11. Workers play dominoes while relaxing before their next shift underground. 
12. Control and management center CMS. Primary data from the main sensors characterizing the functioning of the system flows here.
When the collider is operating, a team of 8 people works here around the clock. 
13. It must be said that the Large Hadron is currently shut down for two years to carry out a program of repairs and modernization of the collider.
The fact is that 4 years ago there was an accident on it, after which the collider never worked at full capacity (I will talk about the accident in the next post).
After modernization, which will be completed in 2014, it should operate at even greater power.
If the collider were working now, we would definitely not be able to visit it 
14. Using a special technical elevator, we descend to a depth of more than 100 meters, where the Collider is located.
The elevator is the only means of rescuing personnel in case of emergency, because... there are no stairs here. That is, this is the safest place in the CMS.
According to the instructions, in the event of an alarm, all personnel must immediately go to the elevator.
Excessive pressure is created here so that in case of smoke the smoke does not get inside and people do not get poisoned. 
15. Boris is worried about there being no smoke. 
16. At depth. Everything here is permeated with communications. 
17. Endless kilometers of wires and cables for data transmission 
18. There are a huge number of pipes here. So-called cryogenics. The fact is that helium is used inside the magnets for cooling. Cooling of other systems, as well as hydraulics, is also necessary. 
19. In the data processing rooms located in the detector there is a huge number of servers.
They are combined into so-called incredible performance triggers.
For example, the first trigger in 3 milliseconds from 40,000,000 events should select about 400 and transfer them to the second trigger - the highest level. 
20. Fiber optic madness.
Computer rooms are located above the detector, because There is a very small magnetic field here, which does not interfere with the operation of electronics.
It would not be possible to collect data in the detector itself. 
21. Global trigger. It consists of 200 computers 
22. What kind of Apple is there? Dell!!! 
23. Server cabinets are securely locked 
24. A funny drawing on one of the operators’ workplaces. 
25. At the end of 2012, the Higgs Boson was discovered as a result of an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and this event was widely celebrated by CERN workers.
The champagne bottles were not thrown away after the celebration on purpose, believing that this was only the beginning of great things 
26. On the approach to the detector itself there are signs everywhere warning about radiation hazards 
26. All Collider employees have personal dosimeters, which they are required to bring to the reading device and record their location.
The dosimeter accumulates the radiation level and, if it approaches the limit dose, informs the employee, and also transmits data online to the control station, warning that there is a person near the collider who is in danger 
27. Right in front of the detector is a top-level access system.
You can log in by attaching a personal card, a dosimeter and undergoing a retinal scan 
28. What I do 
29. And here it is - the detector. The small sting inside is something similar to a drill chuck, which houses those huge magnets that would now seem very small. At the moment there are no magnets, because... undergoing modernization 
30. In working condition, the detector is connected and looks like a single unit 
31. The weight of the detector is 15 thousand tons. An incredible magnetic field is created here. 
32. Compare the size of the detector with the people and equipment working below 
33. Blue cables - power, red - data 
34. Interestingly, during operation, the Big Hadron consumes 180 megawatts of electricity per hour. 
35. Routine maintenance work on sensors 
36. Numerous sensors 
37. And power to them... fiber optic comes back 
38. The look of an incredibly smart person. 
39. An hour and a half under the ground flies by like five minutes... Having risen back to the mortal earth, you involuntarily wonder... HOW this can be done.
AND WHY do they do this…. 
(or TANK)- currently the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. This colossus was launched in 2008, but for a long time it worked at reduced capacity. Let's figure out what it is and why we need a large hadron collider.
History, myths and facts
The idea of creating a collider was announced in 1984. And the project for the construction of the collider itself was approved and adopted already in 1995. The development belongs to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). In general, the launch of the collider attracted a lot of attention not only from scientists, but also from ordinary people from all over the world. They talked about all sorts of fears and horrors associated with the launch of the collider.
However, someone even now, quite possibly, is waiting for an apocalypse associated with the work of the LHC and is cracking at the thought of what will happen if the Large Hadron Collider explodes. Although, first of all, everyone was afraid of a black hole, which, at first being microscopic, would grow and safely absorb first the collider itself, and then Switzerland and the rest of the world. The annihilation catastrophe also caused great panic. A group of scientists even filed a lawsuit in an attempt to stop construction. The statement said that the antimatter clumps that can be produced in the collider will begin to annihilate with matter, starting a chain reaction and the entire Universe will be destroyed. As the famous character from Back to the Future said:
The entire Universe, of course, is in the worst case scenario. At best, only our galaxy. Dr. Emet Brown.
Now let's try to understand why it is hadronic? The fact is that it works with hadrons, or rather accelerates, accelerates and collides hadrons.
Hadrons– a class of elementary particles subject to strong interactions. Hadrons are made of quarks.
Hadrons are divided into baryons and mesons. To make it easier, let's say that almost all the matter known to us consists of baryons. Let's simplify even further and say that baryons are nucleons (protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus).
How the Large Hadron Collider works
The scale is very impressive. The collider is a circular tunnel located underground at a depth of one hundred meters. The Large Hadron Collider is 26,659 meters long. Protons, accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light, fly in an underground circle across the territory of France and Switzerland. To be precise, the depth of the tunnel ranges from 50 to 175 meters. Superconducting magnets are used to focus and contain beams of flying protons; their total length is about 22 kilometers, and they operate at a temperature of -271 degrees Celsius.
The collider includes 4 giant detectors: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. In addition to the main large detectors, there are also auxiliary ones. Detectors are designed to record the results of particle collisions. That is, after two protons collide at near-light speeds, no one knows what to expect. To “see” what happened, where it bounced and how far it flew, there are detectors stuffed with all kinds of sensors.
Results of the Large Hadron Collider.
Why do you need a collider? Well, certainly not to destroy the Earth. It would seem, what is the point of colliding particles? The fact is that there are a lot of unanswered questions in modern physics, and studying the world with the help of accelerated particles can literally open up a new layer of reality, understand the structure of the world, and maybe even answer the main question of “the meaning of life, the Universe and in general” .
What discoveries have already been made at the LHC? The most famous thing is the discovery Higgs boson(we will devote a separate article to him). In addition, they were open 5 new particles, the first data on collisions at record energies were obtained, the absence of asymmetry of protons and antiprotons is shown, unusual proton correlations discovered. The list goes on for a long time. But the microscopic black holes that terrified housewives could not be detected.
And this despite the fact that the collider has not yet been accelerated to its maximum power. Currently the maximum energy of the Large Hadron Collider is 13 TeV(tera electron-Volt). However, after appropriate preparation, the protons are planned to be accelerated to 14 TeV. For comparison, in the accelerators-precursors of the LHC, the maximum obtained energies did not exceed 1 TeV. This is how the American Tevatron accelerator from Illinois could accelerate particles. The energy achieved in the collider is far from the highest in the world. Thus, the energy of cosmic rays detected on Earth exceeds the energy of a particle accelerated in a collider by a billion times! So, the danger of the Large Hadron Collider is minimal. It is likely that after all the answers are obtained using the LHC, humanity will have to build another more powerful collider.
Friends, love science, and it will definitely love you! And they can easily help you fall in love with science. Ask for help and let your studies bring you joy!
After a series of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), specialists from the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of a new particle called a pentaquark, previously predicted by Russian scientists.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an accelerator designed to accelerate elementary particles (in particular, protons).
It is located in France and Switzerland and belongs to the European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, CERN).
At that time, scientists were not exactly clear how the particle they discovered corresponded to the predictions of the Standard Model. By March 2013, physicists had enough data on the particle to officially declare it to be the Higgs boson.
On October 8, 2013, the British physicist Peter Higgs and the Belgian François Engler, who discovered the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking (due to this violation, elementary particles can have mass), were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for “the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that provided insight into the origin of the masses of elementary particles.”
In December 2013, thanks to data analysis using neural networks, CERN physicists for the first time traced the decay of the Higgs boson into fermions - tau leptons and b-quark and b-antiquark pairs.
In June 2014, scientists working at the ATLAS detector, after processing all the accumulated statistics, clarified the results of measuring the mass of the Higgs boson. According to their data, the mass of the Higgs boson is 125.36 ± 0.41 gigaelectronvolts. This is almost identical - both in value and in accuracy - to the result of scientists working on the CMS detector.
In a February 2015 publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists stated that a possible reason for the almost complete absence of antimatter in the Universe and the predominance of ordinary visible matter could be the movements of the Higgs field - a special structure where Higgs bosons “live”. Russian-American physicist Alexander Kusenko from the University of California at Los Angeles (USA) and his colleagues believe that they managed to find the answer to this universal riddle in the data that was collected by the Large Hadron Collider during the first stage of its operation, when the boson was discovered Higgs, the famous "God particle".
On July 14, 2015, it became known that specialists from the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), after a series of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), announced the discovery of a new particle called a pentaquark, previously predicted by Russian scientists. Studying the properties of pentaquarks will allow us to better understand how ordinary matter works. The possibility of the existence of pentaquarks, employees of the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics named after Konstantinov Dmitry Dyakonov, Maxim Polyakov and Viktor Petrov.
The data collected by the LHC at the first stage of work allowed physicists from the LHCb collaboration, which searches for exotic particles on the detector of the same name, to “catch” several particles of five quarks, which received temporary names Pc(4450)+ and Pc(4380)+. They have a very large mass - about 4.4-4.5 thousand megaelectronvolts, which is about four to five times more than the same figure for protons and neutrons, as well as a rather unusual spin. By their nature, they are four “normal” quarks glued to one antiquark.
The statistical confidence of the discovery is nine sigma, which is equivalent to one random error or malfunction of the detector in one case in four million billion (10 to the 18th power) attempts.
One of the goals of the second launch of the LHC will be the search for dark matter. It is assumed that the discovery of such matter will help solve the problem of hidden mass, which, in particular, lies in the anomalously high speed of rotation of the outer regions of galaxies.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a charged particle accelerator that will help physicists learn much more about the properties of matter than was previously known. Accelerators are used to produce high-energy charged elementary particles. The operation of almost any accelerator is based on the interaction of charged particles with electric and magnetic fields. The electric field directly does work on the particle, that is, it increases its energy, and the magnetic field, creating the Lorentz force, only deflects the particle without changing its energy, and sets the orbit in which the particles move.
A collider (English collide - “to collide”) is an accelerator using colliding beams, designed to study the products of their collisions. Allows you to impart high kinetic energy to elementary particles of matter, direct them towards each other in order to produce a collision.
Why "large hadron"
The collider is called large, in fact, because of its size. The length of the main accelerator ring is 26,659 m; hadronic - due to the fact that it accelerates hadrons, that is, heavy particles consisting of quarks.
The LHC was built at the research center of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), on the border of Switzerland and France, near Geneva. Today the LHC is the largest experimental facility in the world. The leader of this large-scale project is the British physicist Lyn Evans, and more than 10 thousand scientists and engineers from more than 100 countries took and are taking part in construction and research.
A short excursion into history
In the late 60s of the last century, physicists developed the so-called Standard Model. It combines three of the four fundamental interactions - strong, weak and electromagnetic. Gravitational interaction is still described in terms of general relativity. That is, today fundamental interactions are described by two generally accepted theories: the general theory of relativity and the standard model.
It is believed that the standard model should be part of some deeper theory of the structure of the microworld, the part that is visible in experiments at colliders at energies below about 1 TeV (teraelectronvolt). The main goal of the Large Hadron Collider is to get at least the first hints of what this deeper theory is.
The collider's main goals also include the discovery and confirmation of the Higgs Boson. This discovery would confirm the Standard Model of the origin of elementary atomic particles and standard matter. When the collider runs at full power, the integrity of the Standard Model will be destroyed. Elementary particles whose properties we only partially understand will not be able to maintain their structural integrity. The Standard Model has an upper energy limit of 1 TeV, above which a particle decays. At an energy of 7 TeV, particles with masses ten times greater than those currently known could be created.
Specifications
It is expected to collide in the accelerator protons with a total energy of 14 TeV (that is, 14 teraelectronvolts or 14·1012 electronvolts) in the system of the center of mass of the incident particles, as well as lead nuclei with an energy of 5 GeV (5·109 electronvolts) for each pair of colliding nucleons.
The luminosity of the LHC during the first weeks of its run was no more than 1029 particles/cm²·s, however, it continues to constantly increase. The goal is to achieve a nominal luminosity of 1.7 × 1034 particles/cm² s, which is the same order of magnitude as the luminosities of BaBar (SLAC, USA) and Belle (KEK, Japan).
The accelerator is located in the same tunnel that formerly occupied the Large Electron-Positron Collider, underground in France and Switzerland. The depth of the tunnel is from 50 to 175 meters, and the tunnel ring is inclined by approximately 1.4% relative to the surface of the earth. To hold, correct and focus proton beams, 1624 superconducting magnets are used, the total length of which exceeds 22 km. The magnets operate at a temperature of 1.9 K (−271 °C), which is slightly below the temperature at which helium becomes superfluid.
BAK detectors
The LHC has 4 main and 3 auxiliary detectors:
- ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)
- ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus)
- CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid)
- LHCb (The Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment)
- TOTEM (TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement)
- LHCf (The Large Hadron Collider forward)
- MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC).
The first of them is configured to study heavy ion collisions. The temperature and energy density of the nuclear matter formed in this case is sufficient for the birth of gluon plasma. The Internal Tracking System (ITS) in ALICE consists of six cylindrical layers of silicon sensors that surround the impact point and measure the properties and precise positions of the emerging particles. In this way, particles containing a heavy quark can be easily detected.
The second is designed to study collisions between protons. ATLAS is 44 meters long, 25 meters in diameter and weighs approximately 7,000 tons. At the center of the tunnel, beams of protons collide, making it the largest and most complex sensor of its kind ever built. The sensor records everything that happens during and after the proton collision. The goal of the project is to detect particles that have not previously been registered or detected in our universe.
CMS is one of two huge universal particle detectors at the LHC. About 3,600 scientists from 183 laboratories and universities in 38 countries support the work of the CMS (The picture shows the CMS device).
The innermost layer is the silicon-based tracker. The tracker is the world's largest silicon sensor. It has 205 m2 of silicon sensors (roughly the area of a tennis court) comprising 76 million channels. The tracker allows you to measure traces of charged particles in an electromagnetic field.
On the second level there is an Electromagnetic Calorimeter. The Hadron Calorimeter, at the next level, measures the energy of the individual hadrons produced in each case.
The next layer of the Large Hadron Collider CMS is a huge magnet. The Large Solenoid Magnet is 13 meters long and has a 6 meter diameter. It consists of cooled coils made of niobium and titanium. This huge solenoid magnet operates at full strength to maximize the lifetime of the solenoid magnet particles.
The fifth layer is muon detectors and a return yoke. The CMS is designed to investigate the different types of physics that might be detected in energetic LHC collisions. Some of this research is to confirm or improve measurements of the parameters of the Standard Model, while many others are in the search for new physics.
You can talk a lot about the Large Hadron Collider for a long time. We hope that our article helped to understand what the LHC is and why scientists need it.
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