Source: TH
Context: Currently, engineers are warming up the LHC for its third season of operations, following upgrades
What is the 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.
| About LHC | Description |
| Aim | LHC is expected to throw up evidence of “new physics” — or physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces.
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| Working | 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 |
| Built by | European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) |
| Location | 27-km-long track loop buried 100m underground on the Swiss-French border |
| Experiments | ATLAS, CMS |
| Achievements | Discovery of Higgs boson or “God particle” during the first run; using data to look beyond Standard Model |
| New quest | To further understanding of “dark matter” |
| Nobel prize | Peter Higgs and his collaborator François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013 for the discovery of the Higgs Boson |
| What are Hadrons? | Hadrons are subatomic particles that are made up of smaller particles called quarks. They are one of the two main types of particles that make up matter, the other being leptons. |
| What are Bosons? | In particle physics, a boson is a type of subatomic particle that follows Bose-Einstein statistics, named after the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. |
