What is the Large Hadron Collider and its significance
Why in News?
- The world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will begin smashing protons into each other at unprecedented levels of energy beginning July 5.
- Scientists will record and analyze the data, which are 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.
What is the Large Hadron Collider?
- The Large Hadron Collider is a giant, complex machine built to study particles that are the smallest known building blocks of all things.
- Structurally, it is a 27-km-long track-loop buried 100 metres underground on the Swiss-French border. In its operational state, it fires two beams of protons almost at the speed of light in opposite directions inside a ring of superconducting electromagnets.
- The magnetic field created by the superconducting electromagnets keeps the protons in a tight beam and guides them along the way as they travel through beam pipes and finally collide.
Previous runs & ‘God Particle’ discovery
- Ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN had announced to the world the discovery of the Higgs boson or the ‘God Particle’ during the LHC’s first run. The discovery concluded the decades-long quest for the ‘force-carrying’ subatomic particle, and proved the existence of the Higgs mechanism, a theory put forth in the mid-sixties.
- This led to Peter Higgs and his collaborator François Englert being awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013. The Higgs boson and its related energy field are believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe.
- The LHC’s second run (Run 2) began in 2015 and lasted till 2018. The second season of data taking produced five times more data than Run 1.
- The third run will see 20 times more collisions as compared to Run 1.
Reference
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