World's biggest scientific experiment

With two beams operating at 3.5TeV the Large Hadron Collider (link opens in a new window) (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, is launching the start of its physics programme. During the next phase it will operate for 18 to 24 months and will allow scientists to explore new areas with the potential of interesting discoveries, particularly in the area of super symmetry.

The UK is one of the biggest contributors supplying hardware, computing and scientific expertise to the project, which is based at the European Particle Physics Laboratory CERN (link opens in a new window) (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), near Geneva.

STFC invested more than £500 million over the thirteen year construction period in funding the UK membership of CERN and supporting researchers at 20 UK sites, including the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory who helped build the LHC’s detectors.

“When we study things at the Large Hadron Collider we need equipment which challenges technology and industry to the limit,” said Professor Peter Watkins from the University of Birmingham. “Anything we use in our experiments is reused for other projects. The most obvious is accelerators that are used every day for medical treatment in hospitals around the world.”

The world’s biggest scientific experiment circulates two beams of protons, close to the speed of light, around a 27 kilometre underground accelerator crossing the border between France and Switzerland . Where the particles crash into each other, new ones are formed, spraying out in all directions around the collision point.

“When these beams collide together they recreate the conditions last seen billionths of a second after the Big Bang,” said University of Liverpool physicist, Dr Tara Shears.

These conditions give scientists information about how the Universe began, how nature works and will resolve some important mysteries – from the existence of extra dimensions to dark matter.

This is completely safe. Various people have proposed scenarios in which the LHC could be dangerous, even as far as destroying the Universe! This is completely untrue, and there is more information on CERN’s website that discusses all the key points (link opens in a new window). Whilst the LHC will be the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, it is still dwarfed by the scale of natural events. Cosmic rays in our own atmosphere produce much higher energy collisions and have been doing so since long before mankind existed.

The World Wide Web was designed at CERN in the 1990s to help physicists communicate and now today’s physicists are getting ready to use its successor the Grid.

LHC information

• Technologies developed for particle physics are used in medical scanners and safer radiography
• The World Wide Web resulted from work done at CERN
• Grid-based technology developed for the LHC is being applied to epidemiology and climate change
• UK companies win contracts worth millions of pounds each year

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