Today, the world is standing in front of a Pandora’s Box, but the question is: are we ready to open it? The most brilliant minds of our time have gathered in Geneva to remove the mystery veil that has kept scientists from understanding some of the fundamental events in the Universe.
The Large Hadron Collider is a scientific instrument of a monumental scale and the world’s largest particle accelerator machine. It can be considered the world’s largest fridge, as it will ensure the optimal temperature (1.9 K or -271.3 °C) to protect the LHC from the extremely hot temperature generated by the colliding beams of protons, which can be 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun.
All along the circular LHC accelerator, 9300 magnets (which will be pre-cooled at -193.2 °C (80 K) with 10,080 tones of liquid nitrogen) will be filled with 60 tones of liquid helium, which will bring their temperature further down, to -271.3 °C or 1.9 K.
Inside the accelerator, scientists have recreated the primordial conditions in space: the beams of particles will travel in an ultra-high vacuum resembling the interplanetary space, with internal pressures of 10-13 atm, ten times less the pressure of the moon.
On September 10, scientists will attempt to circulate a beam through the particle accelerator, in preparation for the bigger experiment scheduled to take place later this year, when they will attempt to achieve the acceleration and collision of two beams at the energy of 7 TeV per beam.
According to initial estimations, trillions of protons will travel 11,245 times a second at 99.99% the speed of light around the accelerator ring. According to scientists, 600 million collisions will take place every second. And if that isn’t impressive enough, a nominal proton in the LHC will have the energy equivalent to a person in a Subaru driving at 1700 kph.
Physicists around the world will conduct several experiments, hoping to understand more about our Universe and the principles of physics. The particle accelerator will be used to recreate the conditions after the Big Bang.
The ALICE experiment will collect data on quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter believer to have existed immediately after the Big Bang. ATLAS will attempt a bold search for the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” a hypothetical elementary particle believed to exist, according to the Standard Model of physics, but not yet observed.
In addition to that, ATLAS will also try to make observations on extra dimensions and the particles that could make up dark matter. The CMS experiment will aim at the same goals as ATLAS, but using a different technique, which involves a huge detector magnet system.
The LHCb experiment will try to explain why our Universe appears to be composed of matter, but no antimatter (matter and antimatter have the same mass, but opposed electrical charge).
The TOTEM experiment, in addition to other measurement, will focus on the size of the proton and will monitor LHC’s luminosity. The results will complement data obtained by the CSM detector and other LHC experiments.
The Large Hadron Collider is the most ambitious scientific attempt ever, and is looking for answers that have been inaccessible to scientists so far. The results of the LHC experiment are expected to change what we thought we knew about the Universe, and hopefully turn the “God particle,” if it indeed exists, into a detectable particle.
The experiment has been highly mediatized, especially over the past weeks, when talks of the end of the world started to emerge. Regarding the concerns that the collisions might cause irreversible damage to our planet, or even completely destroy it, the LHC Safety Assessment Group explained that there is nothing to fear.
“Collisions just like those the LHC will make have been produced by cosmic rays bombarding the earth throughout its existence. It would take about 100,000 LHC experiments to match the number of cosmic rays that have already occurred. We can rest assured that our planet will not be affected by the four experiments about to be conducted in Geneva.”
The experiment will take place despite pessimistic, and ungrounded, foretells that September 10 will be the end of the world. The experiment will try to recreate primordial conditions in the Universe, but at a much reduced scale, incapable of producing the catastrophic events that have been predicted.
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