My power point presentation, after having consulted with Dr. Merlo, is going to be about the LHC (lLarge Hadron Collider) in CERN. It is going to be about the structure of the LHC and how it works, also about what the goals were to achieve and the different experiments. How the LHC Works The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It is a 27 km ring of super conducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes. Two tubes are kept at a very high vacuum. They are pushed around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field. These are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a super conducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to about ‑271°C – a temperature colder than outer space! There are thousands of magnets in used to push and direct the beams around the accelerator. To precise, 1232 dipole magnets of 15 m length which are used to bend the beams, and 392 quadruple magnets, each 5–7 m long, to focus the beams. Just before the collision, the magnets squeeze the beams closer together to increase the impact of the collision. All of this is to help scientists to answer key unresolved questions in particle physics. For the past few years, scientists have been able to learn more about particles that make up the Universe and the interactions between them. However, there are still some gaps. The LHC helps fill in these gaps. The six experiments at the LHC are all run by international scientists. The two larger experiments are ATLAS and CMS. They are designed to create the largest and vastess view of physics possible. ALICE and LHCb are the two medium experiments. These two experiments are designed to analyse the collisions in the LHC. TOTEM and LHCf are the two smallest experiments. These experiments are made to focus on the ‘forward particles’ (protons and heavy ions).
