What Is the Large Hadron Collider?

By Adam Mann, Live Science Contributor

The world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, forms a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring under the French-Swiss border.

Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a marvel of modern particle physics that has enabled researchers to plumb the depths of reality. Its origins stretch all the way back to 1977, when Sir John Adams, the former director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), suggested building an underground tunnel that could accommodate a particle accelerator capable of reaching extraordinarily high energies, according to a 2015 history paper by physicist Thomas Schörner-Sadenius.

The project was officially approved twenty years later, in 1997, and construction began on a 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometer) ring that passed beneath the French-Swiss border capable of accelerating particles up to 99.99 percent the speed of light and smashing them together. Within the ring, 9,300 magnets guide packets of charged particles in two opposite directions at a rate of 11,245 times a second, finally bringing them together for a head-on collision. The facility is capable of creating around 600 million collisions every second, spewing out incredible amounts of energy and, every once in a while, an exotic and never-before-seen heavy particle. The LHC operates at energies 6.5 times higher than the previous record-holding particle accelerator, Fermilab's decommissioned Tevatron in the U.S.

The LHC cost a total of $8 billion to build, $531 million of which came from the United States. More than 8,000 scientists from 60 different countries collaborate on its experiments. The accelerator first switched on its beams on September 10, 2008, colliding particles at only a ten-millionth of its original design intensity....https://www.livescience.com/64623-large-hadron-collider.html