For centuries now, scientists have been working on some of the biggest puzzles in the universe i.e. How the universe was formed? What was it made of earlier? What’s the physics behind all these phenomena? and so on. Various experiments of different magnitudes designed and conducted all around the globe had given a very little information regarding the birth of the Universe and several other questions associated with it.
Among several such projects which are in quest of finding the answers to these questions The Big-Bang experiment has stood out to be a very significant one. This multi-billion dollar project aimed at answering these questions and also finding several sub-atomic particles such as Bosons.
The LHC acronym for Large Hadron Collider is the brain-child of many scientists all around the globe. Though the earlier ideas of this monster accelerator and detector was to European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN, but because of the technical and financial glitches several foreign universities, institutes and organisations were roped in.
The LHC is located in the Franco-Swiss border deep underneath the ground under certain restricted conditions. The main aim of this project is to observe the collisions of the particles sometimes even heavy atoms, under the conditions that were said to exist during the formation of early Universe. In astronomy, there are two predominant theories to explain the formation and growth of The Universe. The first is The Big-Bang Theory that proclaims that the Universe was formed from a primordial ball of very hot gasses and is growing, and second is the Steady State theory that claims that the Universe has remained steady from the day of its formation. The LHC attempts to verify The Big-Bang theory.
The particles are accelerated to very high velocities in the LHC, at times reaching 99.999999% the velocity of light, at different stages. This is achieved by pulsating electric and magnetic fields. Each stage induces some energy to the particles and accelerates them to higher velocities. After reaching higher velocities the energy supplied to the particles translates itself into mass, thus increasing the mass of the particles to some extent. The energy in the final stages of the collider reaches upto range of few tera electron volt. There are 4 main detectors in LHC namely ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb to record and collect the data of particle collisions. The collected data is stored in huge mainframe computers on site and also on several systems around the globe. Complex algorithms have been devised to store, retrieve and analyse the data.
LHC has been functional and doing scientific experiments since 2009. The first set of data was collected between 2009 and 2013. After upgrading the LHC has been conducting experiments since 2015. The first run played a very significant role. The data collected upon analysis gave results that were mostly theoretical and were thought to be impossible to be seen in reality. The path breaking finding was the discovery of Higgs Boson, but its findings also include creation of quark-gluon plasma, creation of new composite particle having a bottomonium state, tests on supersymmetry, discovery of two new heavier subatomic particles belonging to baryons and some exotic hadrons called the tetraquark and pentaquark particles.
4 th July, 2012 was a very special day for physicists. The CMS and the ATLAS of LHC reported to have discovered a new particle that has the same mass as that of the Higgs Boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particles. Higgs Boson is expected to have originated from the Higgs field which is thought to exist throughout the space, playing a vital role in understanding of electroweak forces and explaining how elementary particles like quark got mass. It’s named after the physicists Prof. Peter Higgs who contributed significantly towards understanding of such a field and the particle associated with the field. This resulted in Prof. Higgs winning the 2013 Noble Prize for Physics along with Prof. Francois Englert.
Apart from conducting collision experiments with protons, anti-protons and smaller particles, LHC has been conducting experiments with much heavier particles like lead atoms. The scientists expect much more interesting outcomes with lead-proton collisions and are planning to conduct these experiments majorly during the second run. They expect that it would give an insight into understanding what would have happened, what new particles were created a fraction of a second after the Big Bang and help us understand the Universe much better.
Among several such projects which are in quest of finding the answers to these questions The Big-Bang experiment has stood out to be a very significant one. This multi-billion dollar project aimed at answering these questions and also finding several sub-atomic particles such as Bosons.
The LHC acronym for Large Hadron Collider is the brain-child of many scientists all around the globe. Though the earlier ideas of this monster accelerator and detector was to European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN, but because of the technical and financial glitches several foreign universities, institutes and organisations were roped in.
The LHC is located in the Franco-Swiss border deep underneath the ground under certain restricted conditions. The main aim of this project is to observe the collisions of the particles sometimes even heavy atoms, under the conditions that were said to exist during the formation of early Universe. In astronomy, there are two predominant theories to explain the formation and growth of The Universe. The first is The Big-Bang Theory that proclaims that the Universe was formed from a primordial ball of very hot gasses and is growing, and second is the Steady State theory that claims that the Universe has remained steady from the day of its formation. The LHC attempts to verify The Big-Bang theory.
The particles are accelerated to very high velocities in the LHC, at times reaching 99.999999% the velocity of light, at different stages. This is achieved by pulsating electric and magnetic fields. Each stage induces some energy to the particles and accelerates them to higher velocities. After reaching higher velocities the energy supplied to the particles translates itself into mass, thus increasing the mass of the particles to some extent. The energy in the final stages of the collider reaches upto range of few tera electron volt. There are 4 main detectors in LHC namely ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb to record and collect the data of particle collisions. The collected data is stored in huge mainframe computers on site and also on several systems around the globe. Complex algorithms have been devised to store, retrieve and analyse the data.
LHC has been functional and doing scientific experiments since 2009. The first set of data was collected between 2009 and 2013. After upgrading the LHC has been conducting experiments since 2015. The first run played a very significant role. The data collected upon analysis gave results that were mostly theoretical and were thought to be impossible to be seen in reality. The path breaking finding was the discovery of Higgs Boson, but its findings also include creation of quark-gluon plasma, creation of new composite particle having a bottomonium state, tests on supersymmetry, discovery of two new heavier subatomic particles belonging to baryons and some exotic hadrons called the tetraquark and pentaquark particles.
4 th July, 2012 was a very special day for physicists. The CMS and the ATLAS of LHC reported to have discovered a new particle that has the same mass as that of the Higgs Boson, as predicted by the Standard Model of particles. Higgs Boson is expected to have originated from the Higgs field which is thought to exist throughout the space, playing a vital role in understanding of electroweak forces and explaining how elementary particles like quark got mass. It’s named after the physicists Prof. Peter Higgs who contributed significantly towards understanding of such a field and the particle associated with the field. This resulted in Prof. Higgs winning the 2013 Noble Prize for Physics along with Prof. Francois Englert.
Apart from conducting collision experiments with protons, anti-protons and smaller particles, LHC has been conducting experiments with much heavier particles like lead atoms. The scientists expect much more interesting outcomes with lead-proton collisions and are planning to conduct these experiments majorly during the second run. They expect that it would give an insight into understanding what would have happened, what new particles were created a fraction of a second after the Big Bang and help us understand the Universe much better.
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