The LHC is a powerful circular machine, 27 kilometers in diameter, large enough to completely encircle many cities around the world. Its tunnel is so long that it actually straddles the FrenchSwiss border. The LHC is so expensive that it has taken a consortium of several European nations to build it. When it is finally turned on in 2007, powerful magnets arranged along the circular tubing will force a beam of protons to circulate at ever-increasing energies, until they reach about 14 trillion electron volts.
The machine consists of a large circular vacuum chamber with huge magnets placed strategically along its length to bend the powerful beam into a circle. As the particles circulate in the tubing, energy is injected into the chamber, increasing the velocity of the protons. When the beam finally hits a target, it releases a titanic burst of radiation. Fragments created by this collision are then photographed by batteries of detectors to look for evidence of new, exotic, subatomic particles.
The LHC is the ultimate in sheer brute strength. Its powerful magnets, which bend the beam of protons into a graceful arc, generate a field of 8.3 teslas, which is 160,000 times greater than Earth’s magnetic field. To generate such monstrous magnetic fields, physicists ram 12,000 amps of electrical current down a series of coils, which have to be cooled down to –271 degrees C, where the coils lose all resistance and become superconducting. In all, it has 1,232 15-meter-long magnets, which are placed along 85 percent of the entire circumference of the machine. In the tunnel, protons are accelerated to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light until they hit a target, located at four places around the tube, thereby creating billions of collisions each second. Huge detectors are placed there (the largest is the size of a six-story building) to analyze the debris and hunt for elusive subatomic particles.
Status:: #wiki/notes/mature
Plantations:: Quantum Physics
References:: Parallel Worlds