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World's Largest Atom-Smasher Going to to Completion at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research
:: 26 March, 2008
The world's biggest atom-smasher, now close to completion at the CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) laboratory near Geneva, is a study in big numbers:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will whiz protons to 99.9999 per cent of the speed of light in two parallel beams in a ring-shaped tunnel, 27 kilometres (16.9 miles) long and up to 175 metres (568 feet) below the ground. The tunnel straddles the French-Swiss border.
In top gear, the LHC will generate nearly a billion collisions per second. Above ground, a farm of 3,000 computers, will rapidly crunch this number down to about 100 collisions that are of the most interest. The data will then be sent out to a grid of institutions and universities around the world for analysis – a sort of mini-World Wide Web of its own.
The tunnel is the world's largest fridge, with parts reaching a temperature as low as -271ºC, which is colder than deep space.
The detectors are Herculean in scale. The biggest, called ATLAS, is 46 metres long and 25 metres high, or about half the size of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. At 7,000 tonnes, ATLAS weighs almost as much as the Eiffel Tower, and has 3,000 km of cabling. Nearly 300,000 tonnes of rock were dug to house ATLAS and 50,000 tonnes of concrete were poured. In one year, ATLAS will generate 3,200 terabytes of raw data, equivalent to 160 times the three billion books in the U.S. Library of Congress.
In the course of a 10-hour experiment, a beam might travel more than 10 billion kilometres, enough to get to Neptune and back. At full intensity, each beam will have the equivalent energy of a car travelling at 1,600 km/h. The LHC will use up 120 megawatts of power, equal to all the households in the Geneva area.
LHC collisions will generate 14 teraelectronvolts (TeV), amounting to a high concentration of energy but only at an extraordinarily tiny scale. One TeV is the equivalent energy of motion of a flying mosquito.
Some physicists have wondered whether the LHC will produce minute black holes and nasty (but so far entirely theoretical) phenomena called strangelets that would reduce Earth to a lump of hot, strange matter. CERN says any black holes would be so weak that they could not exert sufficient gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter. As for strangelets, CERN points out that Earth is battered by cosmic rays of much higher energy intensities, but the planet is still here.
The price tag for building the LHC is put at 6.03 billion Swiss francs (A$6.5 billion), two-thirds of which went into materials and a third into paying for an army of thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians to design and install it.
About Large Hadron Collide
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and hadron collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (46°14′N, 6°03′E). Currently under construction, the LHC is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008. The LHC is expected to become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and 'missing links' in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify all of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravitation. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.
The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 26.659 kilometres (16.5 miles), at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider.
The 3.8 metre diameter, concrete-lined tunnel crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although the majority of its length is inside France. The collider itself is located underground, with many surface buildings holding ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.
The collider tunnel contains two pipes enclosed within superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium, each pipe containing a proton beam. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Additional magnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between them will take place. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes.
The construction of LHC was originally approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss francs, with another 210 million francs (140 M€) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (300 M€) in the accelerator, and 50 million francs (30 M€) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN's budget pushed the completion date out from 2005 to April 2007. 180 million francs (120 M€) of the cost increase has been the superconducting magnets. There were also engineering difficulties encountered while building the underground cavern for the Compact Muon Solenoid. The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between $5 and $10 billion.
About European Organization for Nuclear Research
The European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them.
The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.
CERN currently has approximately 2600 full-time employees. Some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.
As an international facility, the CERN sites are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, and some company vehicles have diplomatic number plates. This includes the organization's fleet of fire trucks.
The acronym CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954. According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is [not]".
Soon after its establishment, the work at the laboratory went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus, into higher-energy physics, an activity which is mainly concerned with the study of interactions between particles. Therefore the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules) which better describes the current research being performed at CERN.
In figure, Accelerated particles: Housed in a 27-kilometre-circumference tunnel under the French-Swiss border, the LHC is expected to be up and running by July or August.
Tags: World's Largest Atom-Smasher Going to to Completion at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research , CERN , European Organisation for Nuclear Research , Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , detector , ATLAS ,
