A marvel of modern science and research.
Scientists and research geeks in the modern scientific community have always been quite intrigued about the travelling of humans, machines, or objects, the speed at which light travels.
Travelling faster than the speed of light or nearing it has always been a paramount quest going in and around for many sci-fi writers, modern research people, and tech lovers too.
It has been on the cards of interest for such a brief timeline for many. As we all know, the speed of the light is 3*10⁸m/sec. In the modern era of science and research, there is an impossible probability of objects travelling at the speed of light. Theoretical physicists & researchers often quote “darker than black” when they look upon this unfeasible idea.
Do you think this is possible?
However, through the complete potential of mankind, we humans have attained the mark of near approximation by making particles travel very close to the speed of light through the world’s largest man-made machine.
We weren’t able to move it to complete 100% (Nearly equal to the speed of light) but can you guess where we finally ended up? Can you believe it if I say that we finally ended up with 99.9999991% of the total speed? It’s indeed a great leap for our technology growth and the scientific development as humans on earth. Let’s dive straight into it.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) :
The large hadron collider is the world’s most powerful and largest energy particle collider. It was constructed after several years of research and development possibilities between 1998–2008. It was implemented by a large European organization called CERN which was devoted to the betterment of particle physics.
This experimental approach involved 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities, laboratories, and even countries. It was implemented in Geneva. To be specific, the operation got started on 10th September 2008 and the functions took over accordingly.
LHC consisted of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with several accelerating structures to accelerate the particles along the way. The 27-kilometre tunnel housed the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which is a circular one. It is located 165–575 feet below the ground between the borders of France and Switzerland.
Structure & Function of the operation :
Inside the structure of the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams are made to travel near the speed of light in the opposite directions through 2 separate tubes at ultra-high vacuum.
They are specially maintained around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field by superconducting electromagnets. These electromagnets are constructed through special electric cables that can operate in super conduction state efficiently. This requires cooling of the magnets to -271.3°C.
Magnets of different sizes and varieties are used to direct beams around the heavy accelerator. These magnets include 1232 dipole magnets which are 15m in length which is used to bend the beams and 392 quadrupole magnets of length 5–7m which provided the focusing of the beams through the acceleration.
Inside LHC, the beams are directed to collide at 4 different locations around the accelerator ring, which corresponds to four particle detectors, namely ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb.
This experiment required a Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LHC) which is a global network of computers and software essential for processing the masses of data recorded by all the detectors inside the LHC. The heart of the LHC is the ring that runs through the circumference of the LEP tunnel.
Hence at four points in the ring, the beams get intersected and a small proportion of the particles crash into each other. At maximum power, collisions between protons will take place at a combined energy of up to 13 TeV.
A huge setup of heavy magnets and banks of detectors are used to collect the particles produced by the collisions. The total cost of this project is about $4.75 billion which remains the most expensive figure for this kind of complex experiment.
Purpose of LHC :
The primary purpose of the LHCs detectors is to allow the measurement of properties of the particles Higgs boson and also searching for a large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories.
It allows scientists to recreate the conditions that existed within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang by colliding high energy beams at colossal speeds, close to the speed of light.
Another purpose of this large experiment is to find solutions for unsolved puzzles about space, the universe, and dark matter from a larger perspective through the fundamental study of particle functioning and its prime properties.
Achievements of LHC :
LHC is the first particle collider where the particles collide in all four detectors at 450GeV. LHC becomes the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator achieving 1.18TeV per beam by beating the Tevatron’s previous record of 0.98TeV per beam which was held for eight years.
It received its first scientific results, covering 284 collisions in the ALICE detector. One of the biggest achievements of the Large Hadron Collider was the discovery of the particle Higgs Boson and confirmation of its existence. It was useful to study its properties and functions.
“Higgs Boson’s properties are very different from other elementary particles which might give useful indications about physics beyond the Standard model,” says Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General.
It is well known that it is not possible to travel or make a manmade or natural object travel at the speed of light. However, our extensive approach to expanding our scientific boundaries has resulted well in many discoveries and foundations even on the fundamental level to attain more decisiveness.
And guess what? the universe has the only capability to expand at the speed of light. Nothing certain other than that.
Hope you found this blog useful.
Thank you for reading it!
