The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an underground accelerator ring 27 kilometres in circumference at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland. It will recreate the conditions at the birth of the universe by smashing protons together at incredibly high speeds.
This computer generated image shows the 27-km LHC tunnel (in blue) on the Swiss-France border. The four main experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb) are located in underground caverns connected to the surface by pits as deep as 150 metres.
The last elements of the Large Hardron Beam pipe and vacuum chamber in the ATLAS detector are installed. The ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons such as extra dimensions and dark matter.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of the six particle detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. A small group of scientists fear the LHC could create a black hole that would swallow the Earth.
The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector with its magnet doors closed. The LHC will use it to collide lead ions - hopefully recreating the conditions just after the Big Bang under laboratory conditions.
The ALICE experiment's inner tracker is integrated. Collisions in the LHC will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun. Physicists hope that under these conditions, the protons and neutrons will 'melt', creating quark‑gluon plasma, which is believed to have existed soon after the Big Bang.
Scientists assemble the last module of the locator for the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty). This experiment seeks to find out why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter. It will do this by studying a type of particle called the 'beauty quark'
technician walks under the core magnet of the CMS experiment (Compact Muon Solenoid). This will search for the 'Higgs boson'. Peter Higgs suggested that all particles had no mass just after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled an invisible force field called the 'Higgs field' formed together with the 'Higgs boson'. Any particles that interact with it are given a mass. Scientists hope this experiment will prove the theory.
Workers dig tunnels where counter-circulating beams will be dumped. Travelling just a fraction under the speed of light, the beams at the LHC will each carry the energy of an aircraft carrier travelling at 12 knots. In order to dispose of these beams safely, a beam dump is used to extract the beam and diffuse it before it collides with a radiation shielded graphite target.
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