CERN and the Large Hadron Collider

"The world's biggest science experiment"

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. Based at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland, it is the world’s largest laboratory and is dedicated to the pursuit of fundamental science.

The LHC will allow scientists to reproduce the conditions that existed within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. This is the moment, around 14 billion years ago, when the Universe is believed to have started with an explosion of energy and matter. During this first moment of time the particles and forces that shaped our Universe came into existence.

Scientists will recreate these conditions by colliding beams of high-energy protons or ions at close to the speed of light. This takes place inside the LHC’s 27km circular accelerator 100m below the ground.

In March 2010 the LHC achieved a world-record highest energy of collisions at 7TeV enabling scientists to potentially discover some new particle and nuclear physics for the very first time.

Through STFC’s subscription, the UK is one of the biggest investors in CERN and through its membership UK companies can bid for lucrative high-tech contracts. In addition UK scientists, with funding from STFC, have contributed vital hardware, computing and expertise to the LHC.

This benefits both the economy and the UK’s science base as:

• UK industry won more than £27 million worth of contracts from CERN during the construction of the LHC
• UK industry continues to win, on average, around £15m every year in contracts from CERN. In 2009 the UK IT company Viglen won a £1.8m contract to provide part of the required processing power needed to analyse data from the LHC
• More than 20 research groups across the UK helped prepare for the LHC A number of spin-off technologies have come from scientists’ work in preparing for the LHC and many new applications are anticipated – hardly surprising since the last major experiment at CERN resulted in the creation of the World Wide Web.

The British engineer and computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, designed the Web to make it easier for scientists in different locations to work together.

STFC spin-out company Constellation Technologies is using computing technology developed for the LHC to provide products and services to industry and academics.

The next leap in connecting computers is expected to be the Grid. It will allow people to share things other than files and facts, such as processing power and data storage space. It is expected that roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data will be generated by the LHC annually – enough to fill more than 20,000,000 million CDs.

Scientists working with CERN are building a worldwide Grid for the particle physics community. GridPP is the UK’s contribution and is a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from 19 UK universities and STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Research undertaken at the LHC is also expected to have wider benefits to society potentially leading to new cancer therapies, types of medical and industrial imaging, and manufacturing processes.

There are four main experiments at the LHC - each installed in huge underground caverns around the four collision points of the LHC beams. They are:

• ATLAS – a general purpose detector designed for a wide range of physics, from the search for the Higgs boson to supersymmetry
• CMS – the Compact Muon Solenoid – similar to ATLAS but with different technical solutions and design, its goal is to seek out new physics, whatever form it may take
• ALICE – A Large Ion Collider Experiment to study the state of matter that probably existed just after the Big Bang before particles such as protons and neutrons were formed
• LHCb – Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment which is helping scientists understand why our Universe is made of the matter we observe

Research and development is taking place for eventual upgrades to the tracking detectors for both ATLAS and CMS to extend the scientific reach of these experiments even further.

Contact

Charlotte Jamieson
UK CERN Liaison
Tel: +44 (0)1793 442 027
Email: charlotte.jamieson@stfc.ac.uk
LHC website: http://www.lhc.ac.uk
CERN website: http://www.cern.ch

For media enquiries please telephone: +44 (0)1235 445 627

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the LHC factsheet (PDF - 953kB) (link opens in a new window)

Version 02 - May 2010