Large Hadron Collider

Why in news?

Engineers are warming up the LHC for its 3rd season of operations with upgrades, that makes it more sensitive and accurate than before.

What is Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?

• Hadrons - A hadron is a subatomic particle that contains quarks, antiquarks, and gluons.
• The LHC typically uses protons, which are made up of quarks and gluons.
• The LHC, built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), conducts experiments with highly energized particles.
• It energizes the protons by accelerating them through a narrow circular pipe.
• The LHC consists of 9 detectors, including CMS, ALICE, LHC-B and ATLAS, located over different points on the beam pipe and study particle interactions in different ways.

How it works?

• Objective - The LHC collides two beams of protons together at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory and study the results of these collisions with massive detectors built in underground caverns.
• Working - The circular pipe encircles two D-shaped magnetic fields, created by almost 9,600 magnets.
• A proton is made to move by turning on one hemisphere of magnets and turning off the other, such that the magnetic field acting on the proton causes it to move clockwise.
• Then, the magnetic polarity is reversed by turning off the first hemisphere and turning on the second and causes the proton to move in an anticlockwise direction.
• By switching the direction of the magnetic field more and more rapidly, protons can be accelerated through the beam pipe.
• There are also other components to help them along and to focus the particles and keep them from hitting the pipe’s walls.
• Eventually, the protons move at 99.999999% of the speed of light.
• The LHC’s various components are built such that scientists can tweak all these parameters to study different particle interactions.

What are the goals of LHC?

• The primary goal is to understand the nature of the most basic building blocks of the universe and how they interact with each other.
• To discover Higgs boson and determine how particles acquire mass.
• To search for possible new generations of quarks or leptons.
• To confirm/disprove the elementary nature of quarks/leptons.
• To discover direct evidence for the particle responsible for the dark matter in the Universe.
• Higgs Boson - Sometimes referred to as the “God particle” Higgs Boson was first discovered by the ATLAS and CMS detectors in 2012.
• The Higgs boson was the last remaining piece of the standard model of particle physics.

The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing 3 of the 4 known fundamental forces in the universe (excludes gravitational forces) and classifying all known elementary particles.

Quick facts

References

1. The Hindu│ Large Hadron Collider
2. India At CERN│India’s Contributions
3. CERN│About LHC
4. Interesting Engineering│About FASER