Hadron Collider

Scientific development has come quite far since the 17th century, where the first traces of modern science had been seen. One of the advanced developments happens to be particle accelerators. CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) houses one of these and uses it to study many particles- such as Higgs Boson and Top Quark, both being two of the largest subatomic particles. The Hadron collider or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Simply put, it energizes subatomic particles (or elementary particles) such as protons and electrons to extremely high levels. This process is achieved through a 27 kilometer long ring of superconducting magnets and other accelerating structures. It works by making two high-energy particle beams collide after they get close to the speed of light. When these two beams collide, all the energy that gets packed into that small point of collision releases and creates a mass of subatomic particles, as mentioned earlier, the top quark and higgs boson. This is crucial in understanding the nature of matter and origins of our universe. These accelerators are not as powerful as you might think though. They produce collisions of just 13 TeV (Tera-electronvolt)-for comparison, you can take 3 billion of those collisions and power a 60 watt light bulb for just one second. Some could say it is the practical equivalent of zero as it would not even be noticeable. Moving onto some astonishing figures! The hadron collider has 1232 dipole magnets, each 15m in length, 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5-7 meters long- each to just focus the beams! This is done as the particles are so tiny that it is akin to making two needles, 10km apart, collide such that they meet halfway. Talk about precision. All this is done under the roof of the CERN control center - literally. The accelerator is underground and its detectors are at 4 locations around the facility. Technology continues to advance at an ever increasing pace, so it is worth taking a look at these inventions as they are very interesting and often spark curiosity about other topics, increasing your knowledge steadily.