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No Boundaries Science: The Large Hadron Collider, the Biggest Machine Ever Made

The Large Hadron Collider, also known as LHC, is an accelerator of charged particles in the form of oncoming beams, and also the world's largest single machine..
LHC 9 photos
Photo: CERN LHC
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It was designed to accelerate protons and heavy ions in order to study the products and reactions of their collisions. It is not only the largest, but also the most powerful machine of its type, with particle beams colliding in it with the help of a superconducting magnet system that has an unprecedented energy:  of 14 tera-electron volts (TeV).

To better understand what that means, 1 TeV is roughly the amount of energy created by the motion of a flying mosquito. That doesn’t sound that powerful right? The thing is, there are 14-tera worth of mosquitos in there (many zeroes), and all of that energy is squeezed into a space that is millions times smaller than a mosquito.

This wonderful machinery is built beneath the border between Switzerland and France, and has a personnel of more than 10 thousand scientists and engineers from more than a hundred countries, all involved in construction and research. As of 2009, which actually was the second launch of the LHC (the first ended in an accident), the cost of its construction amounted to a whopping $6.6 billion.

Large Hadron Collider \- CERN
Photo: LHC CERN
The name LHC, actually is not as smart as the things it does but if you have a basic understanding of science you kind of get what the machinery is all about. “Large” because the diameter is in excess of 16 miles and the length around 62, “Hadron” due to the fact that it accelerates hadrons (two or more quarks held together by a strong force) and “Collider” due to the fact that the particle beams are accelerated in opposite directions and collide in specially designated spots that are equipped with sensors.

So why is this mega machine necessary?

The fact is that only with the help of technologies like the LHC can scientists answer and study questions such as, what happened immediately after the so-called Big Bang? By now, we managed to find that our Universe arose more than 13 billion years ago, information that was not available before. Also, the collider allowed us to obtain previously unimaginable results in the field of elementary particle physics, getting scientists close to unraveling the phenomena known as “dark energy”, “dark matter” or “antimatter”, for that matter – pun intended.

The Large Hadron Collider also made it possible, through scientific breakthroughs, to prove for the first time in 2012, at CERN, the existence of the so-called “Higgs Boson” which, in turn, helps to better understand the underlying elementary particles and the matter from where it comes from.

Large Hadron Collider \- CERN
Photo: LHC CERN
The Higgs boson is the only representation of an intangible field of energy (force field), a cosmic compound that permeates space and instills elementary particles with mass, according to the Standard Model.

No less important for the LHC is the second parameter, the so-called "luminosity". In experimental elementary particle physics, the “luminosity” is the parameter of the accelerator which characterizes the intensity of the collision of beam particles with particles of a fixed target. Thus, in the future, the LHC will be able to “illuminate” matter much more clearly and receive more accurate results.

Along with expanding the horizon of knowledge and training a new generation of engineers and experimental physicists, the work of the Large Hadron Collider lays the foundation for new technologies in the fields of superconductivity and vacuum (a vacuum is as empty as interstellar space).

Physicists conduct further experiments with the help of the LHC, with the hopes of discovering the “New Physics”, that goes beyond the current Standard Model, which will describe the structure of the micro-world at a deeper level.
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