I just want to see what nature has prepared for us, whether that’s consistent with some current theory or whether it’s something else that no one has ever thought about yet, outside of current knowledge.
- Jordi Garra Ticó
While it slept, we were allowed into the tunnels.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had shut down for two years to upgrade following the discovery of the Higgs boson. In the main ring, 175 m underground, chunks had been cut out of the snaking tubes for essential maintenance. These tubes fire protons in opposite directions, whipping them ever faster until they almost reach the speed of light. Along the 27 km run are four ‘experiments’: vast machines envelop the points at which tubes intersect and particles collide to capture the results. The largest of these, ATLAS, is the size of a six-storey building.
Each collision, known as an ‘event’, produces a splurge of elementary particles such as quarks, gluons and – as we now know – Higgs bosons. On average, events occur 40 million times a second in the LHC.
The precision required for these events is exquisite. Our guide tells us to imagine two people standing six miles apart and each simultaneously firing a gun so that the bullets meet exactly head-on. Except instead of bullets, imagine needles. Inside the tunnels, engineers zip past on bicycles – the best way to get around underground unless you’re a proton. Next to every lift shaft is a bike rack.
In the next few months, the LHC will be switched back on. The 2012 triumph of demonstrating the Higgs boson affirmed the Standard Model: the elegant solution to the building blocks of the Universe. Now, with an anticipated almost doubling of energy for the LHC’s second run, physicists are aiming to “go beyond” the Standard Model.
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Image: Large Hadron Collider
Credit: CERN
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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