GALAXY

Keerthana Ramesh
236PH017
THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER
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OUTLINE OF THE
CONTENTS
1. Introduction to particle physics
2. What is Large Hadron Collider..?
3. Design of LHC and its working
4. Discovery of Higgs Bosons
5. Future Scope
INTRODUCTION TO PARTICLE PHYSICS
• An Elementary particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles.

• The Standard Model presently recognises 17 distinct particles,12 fermions and 5 bosons.

• Hadrons are composite particles made up of elementary quarks.

The two types of hadrons are:

Baryons: Composed of three quarks. Protons and neutrons, which are the building blocks of atomic nuclei, are
examples.
Mesons: Mesons are hadrons composed of one quark and one antiquark. They are less stable than
baryons. Pions(π) are the most well-known example .

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WHAT IS LARGE HADRON COLLIDER..?
• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider, most
complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world.
• It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)between 1998 and 2008.
• It lies in a tunnel of 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as deep as 175metres (574 ft) beneath
the France-Switzerland border near Geneva,Switzerland.

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What LHC is looking for..?

• The primary purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to accelerate particles, primarily protons, to
incredibly high speeds and then collide them together.
• By smashing protons together hard and fast enough, the LHC causes protons to break apart into smaller
atomic subparticles.
• The LHC helps to explore questions related to particle physics, such as the existence of the Higgs
boson (which was discovered at the LHC in 2012), the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and
the properties of quarks and gluons.
• Understanding the Early Universe: By recreating conditions similar to those in the early universe just
after the Big Bang, the LHC allows scientists to study the behavior of matter and mysteries of
antimatter.

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STRUCTURE OF LHC

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BASIC STRUCTURE
 CIRCULAR TUNNEL
• The collider is contained in a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometres(17 mi), at a depth
ranging from 50 to 175metres underground.
• The collider tunnel contains two adjacent parallel beamlines each containing a beam, which travel in
opposite directions around the ring. The beams intersect at four points around the ring, which is where
the particle collisions take place.

 MAGNETS
• 1,232 dipole magnets keep the beams on their circular path. Additional 392 quadrupole magnets are
used to keep the beams focused, with stronger quadrupole magnets close to the intersection points in
order to maximize the chances of interaction where the two beams cross.
• 10,000 superconducting magnets operating temperature of 1.9 K(-271.25 ℃).
 RADIOFREQUENCY CAVITIES
• Radiofrequency cavities are used to accelerate the particles to high energies. These cavities apply
electromagnetic fields to push the particles to higher speeds as they circulate around the collider.

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 DETECTORS
These detectors are designed to observe and record the collisions between particles when the beams intersect. ALICE,
ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, LHCf, TOTEM, MoEDAL, FASER and SND@LHC are the 9 detectors.

 ATLAS - A Toroidal LHC Apparatus

 It is a massive, multi-purpose detector designed to explore a wide range of physics phenomena,
including the search for the Higgs boson, studies of the fundamental forces and particles, and
searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model.
 ALICE-A Large Ion Collider Experiment
 ALICE is a specialized detector designed to study heavy-ion collisions at the LHC.
 It focuses on understanding the properties of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that existed
shortly after the Big Bang.

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 CMS-Compact Muon Solenoid
 Like ATLAS, CMS is designed to study a wide range of physics phenomena, including the Higgs
boson, supersymmetry, and other potential extensions to the Standard Model.
LHCb
 LHCb is designed specifically to study the properties of particles containing b (beauty) quarks.
 It aims to investigate phenomena related to the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, by
studying the decays of particles containing b quarks.

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WORKING
• Before being injected into the main accelerator, the particles are prepared by a series of systems that
successively increase their energy.
1. LINAC-2 : Accelerates proton into energy 50MeV
2. This beam is injected into proton synchrotron:accelerates to 1.4GeV
3. This will followed by another PS:pushes the beam into 25GeV
4. Super Proton Synchrotron:Accelarated to 450GeV
• These protons are finally transferred to LHC pipes
• Proton beams takes 4 minutes and 20 secs to fill each LHC ring,20 minutes to reach their maximum
kinetic energy 6.5TeV.
• As the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 6.5 TeV per beam,giving a total collision energy of
13TeV. At this energy, the protons will move at about 0.999999990 c, or about 3.1 m/s (11 km/h) slower
than the speed of light (c).
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• The two beams converge at one of the detector sites. At that position, there will be 600 million colliding
protons per second.
• When two protons collide, they break apart into even smaller particles. That includes subatomic particles
called quarks and a mitigating force called gluon.
• The detectors collect information by tracking the path of subatomic particles. Then the detectors send data
to a grid of computer systems.
• Protons that fail to collide will continue in the beam to a beam dumping section. There, a section made of
graphite will absorb the beam. The beam dumping sections are able to absorb beams if something goes
wrong inside the LHC.

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COMPUTING THE LHC DATA

• The LHC and the experiments connected to it contain about 150 million sensors. Those sensors will
collect data and send it to various computing systems.
• According to CERN, the amount of data collected during experiments will be about 700 megabytes
per second (MB/s).
• On a yearly basis, this means the LHC will gather about 15 petabytes of data. A petabyte is a million
gigabytes.
• Even using a supercomputer, processing that much information could take thousands of hours.
• CERN's solution to this problem is the LHC Computing Grid. The grid is a network of computers,
each of which can analyze a chunk of data on its own. Once a computer completes its analysis, it can
send the findings on to a centralized computer and accept a new chunk of data.
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DISCOVERIES AND BREAKTHROUHS
Higgs Bosons–The God Particles
• Higgs bosons are elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics, proposed by
physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s to explain how particles acquire mass.
• According to the theory, particles gain mass by interacting with a field called the Higgs field, which
permeates all space.
• The discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on July 4, 2012, by the ATLAS and CMS.
• Scientists detected the Higgs boson indirectly by observing the decay products of collisions
between protons in the LHC.
• The Higgs boson is very unstable and decays almost immediately into other particles after being
produced in a collision.

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FUTURE SCOPE
 HIGHER ENERGY AND MORE DATA
• After renovations to its particle accelerators, the third version of the LHC will collide protons at
13.6 trillion electron volts(TeV). The more-energetic smashes should increase the chances that
collisions will create particles in high-energy regions where some theories suggest new physics.
 DARK MATTER
• After the big bang, Universe started expanding and is still expanding but not in the way it is
supposed to be.
• According to a theory there is some matter in space that is interacting with it which we can't see
known as darkmatter.LHC will also help in resolving this matter.
 ANTI MATTER
• As matter is existing ,antimatter should also exist.This matter is also looked upon and experiments
are running at LHC.
 EXTRA DIMENSION
• As,gravity is a weak force compared to other forces , the reason is assumed that we are experiencing
only a fraction of it and remaining is going in other dimension.Thus, LHC experiments can also help
in concluding that.

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REFERENCES
1. ‘Inside the hunting for new physics at the world’s largest particle collider’,By Dan Garisto,Feb
20,2024
2. ‘How the Large Hadron Collider Works.?’ By Jonathan Strickland,Sep 27,2023
3. ‘How the revamped Large Hadron Collider will hunt for new physics’,By Elizabeth Gibney,March
25,2022
4. ‘The CERN Large Hadron Collider LHC’, By Eberhard Keil,Oct 24,2015
5. Wikipedia,chatgpt

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