Large Hadron Collider? But I just met her!

The Large Hadron Collider is the most expensive experiment in history of our planet. What does it aim to find, and what could this mean for our future?

Particle accelerators are nothing new: we’ve been playing with accelerators since 1929, and even your old CRT monitor is a form of particle accelerator. But atom smashers, as they are sometimes called, are designed to accelerate particles to incredible speeds for the sole purpose of colliding them together – just to see what happens.

That’s what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is all about, except it happens to be the biggest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built.

Inside the LHC
Started in 2001, the Large Hadron Collider is a joint project by CERN, Europe’s leading nuclear research organisation. The acronym comes from the French translation, Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire. To give you an idea just how important CERN is: the web (as distinct from the internet), including the world’s first web server, began at CERN.

The LHC itself occupies a 27km tunnel, based 100M underground and crossing both French and Swiss borders, that used to house the LEP (large electron positron collider) built in the 1980s, and in operation from 1989 to 2000. The LHC was built to replace it, and it comes at a cost of some six billion euros – at least so far, as running costs add to the construction costs – making it the most expensive experiment in history.



And with it the promise to reveal answers to some of physics’ most mysterious questions.

One of the experiments that will be carried out includes looking for elusive dark matter and dark energy. Physicists can see the effects of dark matter and dark energy through the gravitational forces they exert, but haven’t been able to actually detect them. It’s an important investigation – all matter, from that bit of crud under your fingernail to the distant suns millions of light years away, comprises only about four per cent of the universe. The rest, it is theorised, is dark matter and dark energy – but where is it? This is one question the LHC should shed light on.

Then there’s the question of anti-matter. Physicists believe that at the time of the Big Bang equal portions of matter and anti-matter existed and, even if large portions of matter and anti-matter cancelled each other out, there was clearly enough matter left in the universe to create the universe we have today – but we can’t find the remaining anti-matter that should also exist. The LHC may be able to answer the question of where it went, or where it is now.

But perhaps the most important discovery waiting to happen however is the more publicised one – the Higgs-boson particle. While the other mysteries are (clearly!) well worth exploring, the Higgs-boson is a problem right in front of our eyes, quite literally: what gives matter its mass? We know that matter has mass, but we don’t know why, and whatever it is, it’s holding the entire universe together. The Higgs-boson is theorised to be the key, and the LHC can find it.