- LHC is a 26.659 kilometer ring of superconducting magnets cooled to -271.3˚C, a temperature even below the temperature of outer space which is -270.5˚C. It lies 50-175 meters underneath the surface. 1232 Dipole magnets, 15m in length are used for bending the beams and 392 quadrupole magnets, 5-7 meters long are used to focus them. Another type of magnets is used to bring beams closer, just prior to collision. Most of the 9593 magnets installed weigh over 27 tonnes and are made of Copper clad Niobium-Titanium and approximately 96 tonnes of superfluid Helium is required to maintain their operating temperature at -271.3˚C.
- Pipes in which particle beams travel includes 48km of arc sections at 1.9K and 6km of straight sections at room temperature and are kept under ultra high vacuum even higher than the vacuum of intersteller void which is below 1.0133*10^-10 mbar or 10^-13 atmospheres.
- Housing tunnel of beam pipes crosses the France-Switzerland border at 4 points and most of it lies within French territory. The 2 beam pipes run adjacent and parallel crossing at points where main particle detectors- ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb are located. ATLAS detector was used to find Higgs-Boson. Each detector serves a specific kind of detection. Beams travel in opposite direction within these pipes and are made to collide at the intersections at a staggering rate of 1 billion collisions per second. TOTEM, LHCf and moEDAL are the other 3 smaller detectors.
- ATLAS Detector or
#ATLASExperiment is equipped with Muon spectrometer, Magnet system, pixel detectors, transition radiation trackers, semiconductor tracker, electromagnetic calorimeter, and Hadronic calorimeter to record the trail of subatomic particles created in collisions. These trails are latter analyzed to obtain information about the subatomic particles that created them. - ATLAS stands for A Toroidal LHC apparatus. It is the largest detector at 46 meters long, 25 meter wide and 25 meter high and weighs 7000 tonnes. It is used to investigate
#HiggsMechanism,#ExtraDimensions, micro black holes and particles constituting#darkmatter. 
- CMS is for compact muon solenoid and has same scientific goals as ATLAS detector but uses different technology and different magnet system. Its in the form of a multi layered cylinder and weighs more than 13000 tons. At inmost it comprises a particle tracker made entirely of silicon. After that electromagnetic calorimeter then hadronic calorimeter and then the solenoid magnet. At the outmost is the muon detectors and return yoke.
- ALICE Stands for A large ion collider experiment. It is a heavy ion detector. It is designed to study Quark Gluon plasma which is created by the collision of Pb nuclei. Data obtained from these collisions could help understand the beginning of universe. One of the goals is to investigate why Protons and Neutrons weigh 100 times more than their constituent Quarks.
- LHCb or Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment is used to investigate the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called beauty quark or b quark. It includes a forward spectrometer and planar detectors.
- Energy of 6.5TeV per proton has been achieved speeding the protons to 99.9999991% of speed of light which corresponds to a Lorentz factor of 7460, giving total collision energy of 13TeV.
- Pb nuclei collisions create temperature of 5.5 Trillion degree Celsius for a fleeting while which is close to the temperature of Universe when it was only moments old.
- As of 25 Nov 2015 first ion collision was achieved at 1PeV which is a record.
- LHC Computing grid is designed to handle massive amount of data generated by collisions. It includes over 170 computing facilities across 36 countries and is the world’s largest computing grid. Over 30 petabytes of data is produced per year and over 6*10^15 proton-proton collisions has been analyzed by 2012.
- Hadron in Large Hadron Collider stands for particles made of 3 Quarks such as Protons and Neutrons also known as Baryons and particles made of 1 Quark and 1 Antiquark also known as Mesons such as Pions.
- Future runs of
#LHC are aimed at testing Supersymmetry predictions, String theory and expanding our understanding of Higgs mechanism. Scientists will be looking for Sparticles and Gravitons and presence of higher spatial dimensions in data obtained from even higher energy collisions. They will also try to find dark matter and detect dark energy. - It took the effort of thousands of Scientists and Engineers over a period of 10 years and about $10 billion to build the LHC. For second run the estimated power consumption is 750 GWH per year which will cost in excess of 30 million dollars. Annual cost of running experiments comes up to be in excess of a billion dollars.
References:
1)https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider
2)https://home.cern/about/experiments
Image credits goes to respective sources.
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