Scientists have switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the device they hope will unravel some of the remaining mysteries of the universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.
Many people are taking about the end of the earth after this experiment, but i dont think it is true. If it is, then the scientists had never tried such an experiment.

How did our universe come to be the way it is?

The Universe started with a Big Bang – but we don’t fully understand how or why it developed the way it did. The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect – but also expect the unexpected!

• The LHC is installed in a tunnel 3.8 m. in diameter, buried 50 to 175 m. below ground. The tunnel straddles the French-Swiss border to the North-West of Geneva. [see map above]

• Two counter rotating beams are injected into the LHC from the SPS accelerator (the Super Proton Synchrotron).

• The proton beams are injected at 450 GeV and then accelerated to 7 TeV.

• The beam moves around the LHC ring inside a continuous vacuum chambers which pass through a large number of magnets.

• 1232 dipole magnets bend the beam around the 27 km. ring. The momentum of the beam is very high and these magnets have to produce a very strong magnetic field.

• To reach the high magnetic field required, high currents are needed. To avoid excessive resistive losses, the magnets are superconducting. A huge cryogenics system is required to produce the liquid helium needed to keep the magnets cold.

• The cables of the magnets are of a very special design and conduct current without resistance in their superconducting state

• The beams will be stored at high energy for 10 to 20 hours (with a bit of luck). In 10 hours the particles make four hundred million revolutions around the machine. During this time collisions take place inside the four main LHC EXPERIMENTS.