The Location of the Large Hadron Collider: Geneva, Switzerland and France.
Back in 1993, the Congress decided that the Superconducting Super Collider being built near Dallas, Texas was going too far over budget. It was going to "Bankrupt" America with all of its cost overruns. Bill Clinton tried to save the SSC program but budgets needed balancing and science seems to be the first victim of the budget axe. But this Diary isn't about America's lost opportunity, it's about large hadrons!!
- More After The Break -
This is one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it's called the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). See how compact it is? That's a guy on a lift in the center of the picture.
The Large Hadron Collider is a 27km circular tunnel ( among others ) in which protons will be accelerated in opposite directions in two seperate vacuum tubes. They will be guided by a series of different types of magnets. The quadapole magnets will keep the protons bunched together ( since protons are all positively charged, they generally don't like to stay together in a clump ). The dipole magnets will steer the clumps of protons around the ring. The two opposing rings will intersect at four different places where the scientists at LHC hope some of the protons will collide with each other. At each intersection is a different detector. The CMS pictured above, ALICE, ATLAS and the LHCb. There are two other detectors that share an intersection point with the others, TOTEM and LHCf. To get into the severe geekery, please visit the CERN website.
The initial goal of the LHC is to find the Higgs boson. This is the particle that gives mass to quarks, electrons, everything that has mass. The Higgs itself has mass and gives itself mass in a process that I don't understand that has something to do with a Higgs field and particles that fly through it. Some stick like the quark and electron and some don't like the photon and the gluon. You'd think something called a gluon would stick to pretty much everything, but not a Higgs field.
The current existing colliders, KEK in Japan, Tevatron in Illinois and RHIC on Long Island just can't impart enough energy in their respective accelerated particles to create a Higgs boson. Although Tevatron did release some data indicating what mass the Higgs hasn't got.
Long Island's own Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is doing anti-alchemy. Where alchemists would try to turn lead into gold, the scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory are taking gold nuclei and smashing them together, much the same way LHC will be smashing protons, and seeing what comes of their destruction in the energenic mess that ensues. They've won six nobel prizes so I guess they know what they're doing.
One of the things that Brookhaven National Laboratory does in the summer is a community outreach program called Summer Sundays. Sunday August 17 will be focusing on the RHIC and since I live a few miles from the joint, I'm going to indulge my inner geek and go.
If I survive, I'll do a follow up diary.
One final note for perspective. We could have built three Superconducting Super Colliders, budget overruns and all, with the money we've spent on just the rebuilding of Iraq. And the Iraq government has a reported budget surplus!