Analysis Of The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider – Will the findings benefit humankind?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC project started on 10 September 2008 and is made up of a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets, with accelerating structures that help boost the energy of particles along the way of the magnet.

The LHC was built in collaboration of 10 000 scientists and engineers from 100 countries. The LHC can be found in a 27-kilometer tunnel (in circumference) under 175 meters of ground, in between the France-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

The purpose for the LHC is to answer unsolved questions of physics. As Tom LeCompte of Argonne National Laboratory points out: “You don’t want to
The beams travel in the opposite direction inside different beam pipes. The beam pipes are two tubes that are kept at ultrahigh vacuum; they are guided along the ring by a strong magnetic field that is maintained by superconducting electromagnets.

The electro magnets are built from coils of special electric cable that is able to operate in a superconducting state; it conducts energy without the resistance or the loss of energy. These magnets need to be chilled at a temperature of
-271.3 degrees Celsius – this temperature is colder than in outer space and almost reaches absolute zero. Due to the cold temperature that the LHC is kept in a lot of the accelerators are connected to a distribution system that keeps it cool with liquid helium. This also provides other services to the LHC.

Inside the LHC there are thousands of magnets of all shapes and sizes that are used to direct beams around the accelerator; these include the 1232 Dipole magnets that are 15 meters in length as well as the 392 Quadruple magnets that are each 5-7 meters long. The particles being shot out of the beams are so tiny that the challenge of making them collide is equivalent with firing two needles that are 10 kilometers apart with such accuracy that they meet half
CERN was founded in 1954 and is French for ‘Counseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaine’, which means the European Council for Nuclear Research. At CERN scientist, engineers and physicists research the nuclear structure of the universe, using the world’s biggest and best technology to study the basic composition of the universe.

How will all of this benefit humankind? The National Geographic Magazine stated back in 2008 that the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is “simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.”

While this might not directly benefit humankind - in fact it is actually quite scary - the many scientists working on the project are likely to discover things that are important to our survival as they continue to build of their research.
A little more than a century ago the field of physics was boring and uneventful. Atoms were, for example, still considered indivisible. However, since then, research by some rogue scientists led to the discovery of X-rays, gamma rays, as well as radioactivity. Electrons were discovered and atoms became meaningful. Suddenly the previously boring field of physics underwent “one revolution after another”, according to National Geographic. Einstein came up with the theory of relativity in 1905 and by the early 1930s Ernest Lawrence had invented the first circular particle accelerator. Some