Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most ambitious piece of machinery ever conceived and built by man. The particle accelerator, with a circumference of 27km, is located at the CERN facility with straddles the border of France and Switzerland.

The LHC was powered up on Wednesday 10 September 2008, with the first beams being circulated through the collider, and will reach full power, when scientists will begin smashing particles into each other, in mid-November 2008.

The LHC has 4 giant detectors designed to probe new dimensions, search for the Higgs Boson (the so called "God Particle", which gives matter and other bosons mass) and to investigate what the universe was like immediately after the Big Bang.

Legal challenges have been made against the LHC as some believe it could open a black hole that would swallow the earth however scientists insist that the chances of this happening are minuscule citing the such particle collisions take place quite often naturally. The LHC seeks to prove or disprove other important concepts and theories, including super-, and sanathsymmetry, antimatter, as well as confirming the existence of many leptons, such as the muon and gluon.

External Links

LHC Homepage at CERN.