Current location - Education and Training Encyclopedia - Graduation thesis - What is the Large Hadron Collider?
What is the Large Hadron Collider?
The world's largest atomic collider, the Large Hadron Collider, formed a ring 17 miles (27 kilometers) long under the Franco-Swiss border. (Photo: {Max Mixi Lee Bryce/CERN) The KDSPS Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a miracle of modern particle physics, which enables researchers to go deep into reality. Its origin can be traced back to 1977, when Sir John john adams, former director of CERN, suggested that an underground tunnel be built to accommodate particle accelerators with extremely high energy. According to a historical paper published by physicist Thomas Schórner Sadenius in 20 15, 20 years later, the project was officially approved in 1997, and construction began on a ring with a length of 16.5 miles (27 kilometers), which passed through the Franco-Swiss border and could accelerate particles to 99.99 of the speed of light. In this ring, 9300 magnets guide two charged particle packets with opposite directions at the speed of 1 1245 times per second, and finally they are brought together for a frontal collision. The facility can generate about 600 million collisions per second, releasing incredible energy and occasionally emitting a strange and unprecedented heavy particle. The energy source of the LHC is Tevatron, a previously recorded particle accelerator, which was retired from Fermilab.

6.5 times that of "KDSP". The total cost of LHC is $8 billion, of which $536.5438+0 billion comes from the United States. More than 8000 scientists from 60 different countries participated in the experiment. The beam of the accelerator was turned on for the first time on September, 2008 10, and the intensity of colliding particles was only one tenth of the original design intensity. Before it started running, some people worried that the new atomic pulverizer might destroy the earth, perhaps by creating an expensive black hole. But any famous physicist will say that this worry is unfounded.

"LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it may bring risks is pure fiction," Robert Emma, director-general of CERN, told Life Science in the past.

This is not to say that the facility will not be potentially harmful if it is not used properly. If you put your hand into the beam, the beam will focus the energy of the moving aircraft carrier to a width of less than one millimeter, it will make a hole in the beam, and then the radiation in the tunnel will kill you. In the past 10 years,

Breakthrough research, two main experiments of the Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, operate and analyze their data respectively. This is to ensure that the two kinds of cooperation will not affect each other, and that each kind of cooperation will provide tests for its sister experiments. These instruments have produced more than 2000 scientific papers in many fields of elementary particle physics.

20 12 On July 4th, the scientific community held its breath and announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, a 50-year-old theory called the last piece of the standard physical model. The standard model attempts to explain all known particles and forces (except gravity) and their interactions. As early as 1964, the British physicist peter higgs wrote a paper about the particles now named after him, explaining how mass is produced in the universe.

The Higgs particle is actually a field that permeates all spaces and drags every particle that passes through it. Some particles move slowly in the magnetic field, which corresponds to their larger mass. The Higgs boson is an embodiment of this field, which physicists have been pursuing for half a century. The Large Hadron Collider was built to finally capture this elusive prey. It is finally found that the mass of Higgs particles is 125 times that of protons. Francois Englert, Peter Higgs and Belgian theoretical physicist, 20 13 won the Nobel Prize for predicting its existence. Ge Hadron Collider was created by a 3D artist. The beam tube is shown as a transparent tube, and the proton beam rotating in the opposite direction is shown as red and blue. (Daniel dominguez/CERN)

Even with the Higgs particle in hand, physicists can't rest because there are still some loopholes in the standard model. First of all, gravity is not involved, which is mainly covered by Einstein's theory of relativity. Nor can it explain why the universe is made of matter instead of antimatter, which should have been produced in roughly equal quantities at the beginning of time. It is completely silent about dark matter and dark energy and has not been discovered at the beginning of its birth.

Before the Large Hadron Collider started, many researchers would say that the next great theory is a theory called supersymmetry, which adds similar but heavier twin partners to all known particles. One or more heavy partners may be perfect candidates for particles that make up dark matter. And supersymmetry begins to control gravity, which explains why it is much weaker than the other three basic forces. Before the Higgs particle was discovered, some scientists hoped that the boson would eventually be slightly different from that predicted by the standard model, which indicated a new physical phenomenon.

But when the Higgs particle appears, it is abnormal, just within the mass range of the standard model. Although this is a great achievement for the standard model, it left a good clue for physicists not to continue. Some people have begun to talk about the theories pursued in the past few decades. These theories sound good, but the actual observation doesn't seem to be consistent. Many people hope that the next data collection operation of the Large Hadron Collider will help clarify some puzzles.

The Large Hadron Collider was shut down in February 20 18, and was upgraded and maintained for two years. When it comes back online, it will be able to smash atoms with slightly increased energy, but the number of collisions per second is twice as high as before. What will be found then, no one can guess. Some people have been talking about replacing it with a more powerful particle accelerator, which is located in the same area but four times the size of the Large Hadron Collider. This huge substitute may take 20 years and 27 billion dollars to build.

Other resources:

Virtual tour of the large hadron collider. Read more scientific knowledge about CERN. Look at this set of Higgs particle images.