Universe Today

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be re-started on this Saturday morning CERN officials said. Engineers are preparing to send a beam of sub-atomic particles around the 27km-long circular tunnel, which has been shut down since an accident in September 2008. Scientists hope to create conditions similar to those present moments after the Big Bang in search of the elusive Higgs particle to shed light on fundamental questions about the universe.
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The CERN ATLAS apparatus is a detector in CERN which will focus on physics problems like the search for the Higgs boson, particles that may make up dark matter, and extra dimensions. It has similar objectives as another apparatus in CERN, the CMS, but their methodologies as well as the design of the device are different.

ATLAS stands for A Toroidal LHC Apparatus, while CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid.

If either ATLAS or CMS do find what scientists are looking for, it would open up a new frontier for physics. Not only that, our current understanding of matter and energy might have to be rewritten as well.

ATLAS is only part of a much larger machine and project – the LHC or Large Hadron Collider. It is actually the LHC that's been generating a lot of publicity. Once the LHC gets fired up by the end of 2009, it will be able to cause collisions involving up to 7 TeV or energy. That's way above the current world record of 2 TeV.

It is believed that such extremely high energies will allow scientists to probe beyond what particle physics' Standard Model was able to explain.

Then as if that were not enough, plans are underway to up the LHC collision energies to 10 TeV in the months to follow.

Right now, CERN ATLAS is being manned by 2900 physicists from no less than 37 countries. This large-scale collaborative effort, which includes 700 students, is the driving force behind the project.

Although dwarfed by the 27-km-diameter LHC, the CERN ATLAS is quite big for a detector (actually the largest volume particle detector in the world): about 45 meters in length, 25 meters in height, and weighing 7,000 tons.

Its major component is its doughnut-shaped magnet system, made up of eight 25-m long superconducting magnetic coils. Other important components of ATLAS are its Inner Detector, calorimeters, and muon spectrometer.

The LHC project's favorite adjectives are undoubtedly 'powerful' and 'big'. Not only is the LHC's structure big; so is the data that will be collected from the experiments. Imagine information from ATLAS can easily fill up 100,000 CDs every second.

Like its predecessors, ATLAS is built to work as a general-purpose detector. That is, it is capable of detecting a wide variety of particles. This is important, as the very high energy collisions brought about by the LHC may produce different particles with different characteristics.

You can read more about the LHC here in Universe Today. Here are the links:

• Large Hadron Collider
• Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?

Read more about the CERN accelerator complex in its official website:

• The Large Hadron Collider
• The Accelerator Complex

Here are two episodes at Astronomy Cast that you might want to check out as well:

• The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs-Boson
• Cosmic Rays

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Yes, this headline appears to be true. A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating on parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic safety detectors would have shut down the machine. This would put the LHC out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. That's when an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and subsequent damage along hundreds of meters of magnets.

Hmm. The idea of a time-traveling Higgs boson coming back to prevent its own discovery is seeming less and less far fetched!
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The Large Hadron Collider reached an important milestone last weekend as a beam of ions was injected into the clockwise beam pipe. This is the first time particles have been inside the collider since September, 2008 when physicists were forced to shut down the system because of a massive failure. According to a CERN press release, lead ions were placed in the clockwise beam pipe on Friday October 23, but did not travel along the whole circumference of the LHC. CERN officials still hope for a restart in 2009, with the first circulating beam likely to be injected in mid-November, and the first high energy collisions occurring around mid-December.
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The CERN Accelerator Complex is a network of particle accelerators that includes the Proton Synchrotron (PS), the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There are also smaller machines in the Accelerator Complex, such as the Antiproton Decelerator and the ISOLDE (Isotope Separator On-Line).

The plan to build CERN accelerator machines was conceptualized as early as 1952, when the provisional CERN council agreed to construct two particle accelerators for the purpose of probing the nucleus. Since then, a build-up of larger and more powerful machines came into play.

Because accelerators don't become obsolete so easily, some of the machines being used up to this day have already been operating for decades. For example, the Proton Synchrotron was already operational since 1959. Half a century after, scientists have still found use for it. The PS boosts particles and feeds them to the Super Proton Synchrotron. In turn, the SPS further boosts the particles and feeds them to the LHC.

Thus, once the protons reach the LHC, they would have already been accelerated to very high speeds and would have gained very high energies.

The LHC is the largest, most powerful CERN accelerator. Strictly speaking, it is a collider; not just a mere accelerator. Accelerators supposedly accelerate particles and allow them to strike stationary particles. Colliders, on the other hand, accelerate two particles, drive them to opposite directions, and then let them collide head on.

With this set up, the LHC can achieve energies in the TeV range.

Aside from those mentioned, there are still other CERN accelerator machines.

There's the CLIC or Compact LInear Collider. Using CLIC, scientists intend to accelerate electrons and their anti-particles, antiprotons, and bring them to a head-on collision involving several TeV. The energies involved here are about the same as those in the LHC. The main difference lies in the type of particles smashed together.

Another is the n_TOF or neutron Time-Of-Flight facility. Here, scientists produce and study beams of neutrons to shed light on, for example, stellar evolution.

Equally important as any CERN accelerator are the detectors. These are devices used to record data in order to acquire information such as a particle's mass, speed, and electric charge.

Used together, accelerators and detectors have been able to provide scientists valuable information regarding the smallest structures in the Universe. What makes it more exciting nowadays is the notion that, by understanding the very small, scientists can have a better idea as to how the Universe came into being.

You can read more about the CERN accelerator machines here in Universe Today. Here are the links:

• Large Hadron Collider
• Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?

Read more about the CERN accelerator complex in its official website:

• The Large Hadron Collider
• The Accelerator Complex

Here are two episodes at Astronomy Cast that you might want to check out as well:

• The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs-Boson
• Cosmic Rays

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When the media talks about the "god particle", they're really talking about a theoretical particle in physics known as the higgs boson. If reality matches the predictions made by theoretical physics, the higgs boson is the particle that gives objects mass. It explains why objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

One of the primary goals of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is to search for the so called "god particle". When it finally gets running, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will run beams of protons around a 27 kilometer circle, slamming them together at close to the speed of light. All the kinetic energy of the protons is instantly frozen out as mass in a shower of particles. Remember Einstein's famous E=mc² formula? Well, you can reconfigure the equation to be m = E/c².

The higgs boson is thought to be a very heavy particle, and so it takes a lot of energy in the collider to create particles this massive. When the LHC starts running, it will collide protons at higher and higher energies, searching for the higgs boson. If it is found, it will confirm a theorized class of particles predicted by the theory of supersymmetry. And even if the higgs boson isn't found, it will help disprove the theory. Either way, physicists win.

The term "god particle" was coined by physicist Leon Lederman, the 1988 Nobel prize winner in physics and the director of Fermilab. He even wrote a book called the "God Particle", where he defended the use of the term.

We have written many articles about the Higgs Boson and the Large Hadron Collider here on Universe Today. Here's an article about how the LHC won't create a black hole and destroy the Earth. And here's more on Fermilab's search for the Higgs Boson.

You can also check out Leon Lederman's book, the God Particle from Amazon.com.

We have also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast all about the higgs boson. Listen to it here, Episode 69: The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs Boson.

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The LHC or Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. In its main experiment, two beams of high-energy protons will be brought to a head-on collision. A proton is a type of hadron. Hence, the LHC is more specifically referred to as a hadron accelerator.

Each beam is made up of trillions of protons, traveling more than 99.99% of the speed of light. This speed is so fast that even if the LHC’s circumference stretches up to 27 km, it will only need 90 microseconds for each proton to complete one lap around it. That practically translates to about 11,000 revolutions per second in this hadron accelerator.

Each proton will be carrying up to 7 TeV of energy. Thus, some 14 TeV of energy will be involved in just one collision. In the realm of particle physics, high energies are required to probe into the innermost (and tiniest) regions of sub-atomic particles. This is because the energies that bind each particle at these scales are very large.

Other experiments will also be conducted in the world’s largest hadron accelerator. Among them are ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), and Large Hadron Collider beauty, to name a few. There are 6 major experiments all in all.

The construction of the LHC comes at a time when the speed and storage capabilities of computers have evolved exponentially compared to those existing two decades ago, when the idea of this colossal hadron accelerator was first conceived.

In one year alone, the LHC is expected to churn out 15 petabytes (15,000,000,000,000,000) of data. For comparison, most of our hard drives are only up to a few Gigabytes. Even typical servers go up to only the Terabyte (1,000 Gigabyte) range. To achieve this, some 33 different countries are being tapped to take part in a distributed computing and storage infrastructure. This will be known as the LHC Computing Grid (LCG).

The top computer centers will be located in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Spain, Taipei, UK, and USA. This will allow scientists in these countries to have faster access to the data gathered in the experiments.

Scientists working on the LHC are hoping to provide answers to questions that have branched out of particle physics’ Standard Model. Questions involving the origin of mass, unknown entities like dark matter and dark energy, and nature’s bias against antimatter, matter’s almost unknown partner are hoped to be answered through this hadron accelerator.

You can read more about the hadron accelerator here in Universe Today. Here are the links:

• Large Hadron Collider
• Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?

Read more about the LHC on its official websites:

• The Large Hadron Collider
• LHC – The Large Hadron Collider

Here are two episodes at Astronomy Cast that you might want to check out as well:

• The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs-Boson
• Cosmic Rays

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As you are likely aware, there are numerous ways in which the Universe could kill us all, destroying the Earth and whatever signs of human life, or life in general, existed on our planet. Gamma Ray Bursts, Coronal Mass Ejections, or just the odd asteroid or comet slamming into the Earth would easily take out most of the life on our planet. But, what about black holes? Do we have to worry about them, too? Could a black hole wipe out all life on Earth, sucking us all into oblivion? It's possible, but not very likely. And by not very likely, it's calculated that the odds of being killed by a black hole are about one in one trillion.

First, a black hole has to get to the Earth. There are two ways of this happening. The first is that we create one ourselves, the second that a black hole wandering the galaxy happens upon our little Solar System, and meanders in towards the Sun. We'll start with the first scenario: creating our own destruction.

How could we make our own black hole? Well, theoretically, when you slam protons together with enough force, there is the potential for the creation of a small, short-lived black hole. Particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, which is scheduled to start operating again in November 2009, could potentially create miniscule black holes through the collisions of protons. There were many headlines from the mainstream media about the potential of the LHC to create runaway black holes that would find their way to the center of the Earth and devour it from the inside, causing, "total destruction." Sounds scary, doesn't it? Even more, two people were suing to stop the LHC because of the potential hazard they thought it posed.

However, the LHC is in no way going to destroy the Earth. This is because any black holes created by the LHC will almost instantly evaporate, due to what's called Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, which theorizes that black holes do indeed radiate energy, and therefore have a limited lifespan. A black hole with the mass of, say, a few protons, would evaporate in trillionths of a second. And even if it were to stick around, it wouldn't be able to do much damage: it would likely pass through matter as if it didn't exist. If you want to know whether the LHC has destroyed the Earth, go here.

Of course, there are other ways of creating black holes than the LHC, namely cosmic rays that slam into our atmosphere on a regular basis. If these are creating mini-black holes all of the time, none of them seem to be swallowing the Earth whole…yet. Other scientific experiments also aim at studying the properties of black holes right here on Earth, but the danger from these experiments is very, very minimal.

Now that we know black holes created here on Earth aren't likely to kill us all, what about a black hole from the depths of space wandering into our neighborhood? Black holes generally come in two sizes: supermassive and stellar. Supermassive black holes reside in the hearts of galaxies, and one of these is not likely to come barrelling our way. Stellar black holes form from a dying star that, in the end, gives up its fight against gravity and implodes. The smallest black hole that can form from this process is about 12 miles across. The closest black hole to our solar system is Cygnus X-1, which is about 6,000 light years away, much too far to pose a threat by muscling it's way into our vicinity (although there are other ways that it could potentially harm us if it were closer, like blasting us with a jet of X-rays, but that's a whole other story). The creation process for a black hole of this variety – a supernova – could potentially sling the black hole across the galaxy, if the supernova happened in a binary pair and the explosion was asymmetric.

If a stellar black hole were to plow through the Solar System, it would be pretty ugly. The object would likely be accompanied by an accretion disk of heated, radioactive matter that would announce the presence of the black hole by frying our atmosphere with gamma and X-rays. Add to that the tidal forces of the black hole disrupting the Sun and other planets, and you have a huge mess on your hands, to say the least. It's possible that a number of planets, and even the Sun, could be flung out of the Solar System, depending on the mass, velocity, and approach of the black hole. Yikes.

There lies one last possiblity for black holes to wreak their havoc on the Earth: Primordial Black Holes. These are miniature black holes theorized to have been created in the intense energies of the Big Bang (which the LHC plans to mimic on a MUCH smaller scale). Many of them most likely evaporated billions of years ago, but a black hole that started out with the mass of a mountain (10 billion tons) could potentially still be lurking around the galaxy. A hole of this size would shine at a temperature of billions of degrees from Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, and it's likely we would see it coming due to observatories like NASA's Swift.

From a few yards a way, the black hole's gravity would be barely noticeable, so this kind of black hole wouldn't have an effect on the gravity of the Solar System. At less than an inch, though, the gravity would be intense. It would suck up air as it passed through the atmosphere of the Earth, and start to make a small accretion disk. To such a tiny black hole, the Earth seems close to a vacuum, so it would probably pass right through, leaving a wake of radiation in its path and nothing more.

A black hole of this variety with a mass of the Earth, however, would be roughly the size of a peanut, and would be able to potentially swing the Moon straight into the Earth, depending, of course, on the trajectory and speed of the black hole. Yikes, again. Not only that, if it were to impact the Earth, the devastation would be total: as it entered the atmosphere, it would suck up a lot of gas and form a radioactive accretion disk. As it got closer, people and objects on the surface would be sucked up into it. Once it impacted the surface, it would start swallowing up the Earth, and probably eat its way all the way through. In this scenario, the Earth would end up being nothing more than a wispy disk of debris around the remaining black hole.

Black holes are scary and cool, and none of the scenarios depicted here are even remotely likely to happen, even if they're fun to think about. If you want to learn more about black holes,  Hubblesite has an excellent encyclopedia, as does Stardate.org. You can also check out the rest of our section on black holes in the Guide to Space, or listen to the multiple Astronomy Cast episodes on the subject, like Episodes 18, or the questions show on Black, Black Holes. Much of the information on the likelihood and aftereffects of a black hole collision with the Earth in this article is taken from chapter 5 in Phil Plait's "Death from the Skies!"

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The LHC or Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator. Scheduled to be operational some time in November of 2009, the purpose of the experiments to be conducted there is aimed to answer many of the questions raised by the Standard Model as well as the mysteries that surround the Big Bang. 

In fact, collisions to be made in the LHC are believed sufficient to recreate the conditions that were present right after the Big Bang.

Designed and constructed by the folks at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), the LHC crosses the borders of Switzerland and France. It lies some 100 meters underground and comes around in a vast 27 kilometer circumference. Although found in Europe, it was borne out of the collaborative efforts of at least 10,000 scientists and engineers from laboratories and universities around the world. 

To reconstruct the conditions of the Big Bang, two beams of hadrons (protons or lead ions for this purpose) will be made to circle the LHC in opposite directions until they gain sufficient energy for the collision. Once that is achieved, they will be made to collide head-on and the particle fragments will be collected by detectors for analysis.

As of the moment, there are six experiments intended for the LHC: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS (no, they don't build websites in this project), LHCb, TOTEM, and LHCf. 

• ALICE or A Large Ion Collider Experiment is the experiment that will recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.
• ATLAS or A Toroidal LHC Apparatus is designed to investigate many physical mysteries including the elusive Higgs boson.
• CMS or Compact Muon Solenoid has the same objectives as ATLAS but will be using different technical solutions.
• LHCb or Large Hadron Collider beauty will hopefully provide answers regarding the unbalanced presence of matter and antimatter despite nature's general design of symmetry. Right now, we are only able to see more matter than antimatter.
• TOTEM or TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement will focus on a specific selection of experiments such as measuring the size of the proton.
• LHCf or Large Hadron Collider forward will make use of forward particles created inside the LHC in order to simulate the behaviors of cosmic rays.

Some record breaking facts regarding the LHC, aside from it being the largest particle accelerator in the world, include the following:

*It is the world's largest freezer, using at least and nearly 60 tonnes of liquid helium to bring down the LHC's magnets' temperature to 1.9 K or -271.3ºC. 

*It is the world's fastest racetrack, propelling trillions of protons to dash around the LHC's ring at speeds 99.99% that of light's.

*As the emptiest space in the Solar System, it is able to achieve an internal pressure of 0.0000000000001 atm. For comparison, the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1 atm.

We've got some interesting contents regarding the LHC here at Universe Today. Just click the links below:

• Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway for Time Travelers?
• Large Hadron Collider Rap Is a Hit

Read more about the LHC on its official websites:

• The Large Hadron Collider
• LHC – The Large Hadron Collider

You might want to listen to some related episodes at Astronomy Cast as well:

• The Large Hadron Collider and the Search for the Higgs-Boson
• Cosmic Rays

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Question: Will the Large Hadron Collider Destroy the Earth?

Answer: No.

As you might have heard in the news recently, several people are suing to try and get the Large Hadron Collider project canceled. When it finally comes online, the LHC will be the largest, most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed.

If there's something wrong with it, the LHC might have the power to damage itself, but it can't do anything to the Earth, or the Universe in general.

There are two worries that people have: black holes and strange matter.

One of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to simulate microscopic black holes that might have been generated in the first few moments of the Big Bang. Some people are worried that these artificial black holes might get loose, and then consume the Earth from within, eventually moving on to destroy the Solar System.

The physicists are confident that any black holes they create will evaporate almost instantaneously into a shower of particles. In fact, the theories that predict that black holes can be created also predicts that black holes will evaporate. The two concepts go hand in hand.

The other worry is that the Large Hadron Collider will create a theorized material called strangelets. This "strange matter" would then be able to infect other matter, turning the entire planet into a blog of strange matter.

This strange matter is completely theoretical, and once again, the same theories that say it might be produced in the Large Hadron Collider also rule out any risks from it.

One of the most important considerations is the fact that the Moon is struck by high energy cosmic rays that dwarf the power of the Large Hadron Collider. They were likely blasted out of the environment around a supermassive black hole.

These have been raining down on the Moon for billions of years, and so far, it hasn't turned into a black hole or strange matter.

You can read more about the Large Hadron Collider lawsuit here. Or how it might create wormholes, a view into other dimensions, or unparticles.

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