I mentioned CERN's LHC in an old blog post marveling at this image:
Here's a Discover article headlined "The Biggest Thing in Physics".
It's BIG:
The collider’s underground tunnel carves a circle 17 miles in circumference, traversing the border between Switzerland and France. At four locations it passes through caverns crammed with detectors the size of buildings.
Two of those detectors are competing to find evidence of a Higgs boson once the thing is up, running and slamming particles together in ways they've never been slammed before (except during the Big Bang, some physicists say).
We’re about to take an elevator more than 300 feet belowground, into a tunnel containing the biggest, most violently energetic particle collider the world has ever known.
The endless, gently curving tunnel is so crowded with massive high-tech equipment that there isn’t much room for any transportation other than a bike. “Best way of getting around down here,” Limon explains.
What’s filling the tunnel is the beam pipe: the hardware used to accelerate subatomic particles (protons, mostly) to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.
and
When the machine is switched on for the first time at the end of this year, particles will make a lap around the LHC in less than one ten-thousandth of a second.
Keeping those particles on track requires serious bending power from more than 1,200 superconducting magnets, each of which weighs several tons apiece. Each magnet must be kept at –456 degrees Fahrenheit—colder than the void between galaxies—requiring CERN to build the world’s biggest cryogenic system to handle the 185,000 gallons of liquid helium that will be used to chill the magnets.
That's a lot of containment.
And the thing is, the physicists here aren't content just to accelerate mass-bearing particles (protons) to near the speed of light. They're doing it with two streams going in opposite directions, then smashing the streams into one another.
There will be 600 million particle collisions per second, and although the particles themselves are mere specks—less than a million millionth the size of a gnat—their collective energy will be that of an express train.
and, more to the point,
The LHC’s subatomic fireballs will be the highest-energy particle collisions ever seen on Earth. This is uncharted territory: The collisions at LHC could spray out strange new kinds of matter, unfurl hidden dimensions of space, even generate tiny glowing reenactments of the birth of the universe. In short, there is more than just the search for the Higgs going on at the LHC. “We don’t even know what to expect,” says French physicist Yves Schutz. “We’re now in a domain of energy that nobody has ever explored.”
...Many of the particles will survive only a trillionth or less of a second before decaying, but that will be long enough to leave a telltale trail. The vast size of the CMS is a function of the immense energies involved. The bigger the energy, the stronger the magnet needed to deflect the particles and the more space required to register their properties.
The "nobody has ever explored" thing is the part that has some concerned citizens a little wibbly.
This probably isn't in-depth enough for you, but it's all that I know. |
