Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

In News

• Currently, engineers are warming up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for its third season of operations.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

• The LHC is the world’s largest science experiment that smashes tiny particles called hadrons together at really high speeds. It uses protons as the particles and has a long circular pipe where they’re accelerated.
• It is built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
• LHC’s goal is to test the Standard Model, the mathematical framework physicists use to describe all of the known fundamental particles in the universe and the forces through which they interact.
• LHC studies the smallest known building blocks of matter. It fires two beams of protons almost at the speed of light in opposite directions, guided by the magnetic field of superconducting electromagnets.
• ATLAS is the largest general purpose particle detector experiment at the LHC; the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, with the same goals as ATLAS, but which uses a different magnet-system design.

‘God Particle’ & Previous discoveries

• Ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN had announced to the world the discovery of the Higgs boson or the ‘God Particle’ during the LHC’s first run.
  • Higgs boson is the fundamental force-carrying particle of the Higgs field, which is responsible for granting other particles their mass.
  • Peter Higgs and his collaborator François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013 for the discovery of the Higgs Boson.
• Observed exotic particles like pentaquarks and tetraquarks and checked if their properties are in line with theoretical expectations
  • Quarks are elementary particles that usually combine in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.

About CERN

• European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the world’s largest nuclear and particle physics laboratory.
• CERN is based in Geneva on the French-Swiss border. It has 23 member states.
• India in 2016 became an associate member of the CERN. Indian scientists have played a significant role in the ALICE experiment, which is a dedicated experiment for search and study of Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).

Source: TH