World's biggest scientific experiment

The Large Hadron Collider (link opens in a new window) (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, successfully circulated its first beam on 10th September 2008.

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), 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 will circulate two beams of protons, close to the speed of light, around a 27 kilometre underground accelerator. It should start producing results in late 2009, following repairs after a faulty connection halted commissioning in 2008. A new system has been put in place to prevent a recurrence of the fault and first science from the LHC is now eagerly being awaited by particle physicists around the globe.

“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.

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
• So far 65 doctorates have been completed in UK universities on the LHC’s ATLAS detector