by Christina Pomoni

Created on: January 07, 2009

On September 10, 2008, the world stands silent in front of the greatest ever particle physics experiment. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), built to assist scientists to answer chief unresolved questions in particle physics and alter our understanding of the Universe, is aimed to become the world's most powerful particle accelerator with the unparalleled energy it can achieve.

Over the past decades, physicists have been able to illustrate in elaborate detail the fundamental constituent parts that make up the Universe and the relations between them. This understanding is summarized in the Standard Model of particle physics, yet the gaps it contains leaves space for experimental data, which can be achieved with the LHC. After nearly 15 years of planning and theory approach, physicists can use the particle accelerator to study the least known constituent parts of our Universe. Regardless of what will be the result of the experiment, a new knowledge in particle physics is about to emerge describing thoroughly the fundamental laws of Nature but also moving beyond the paradigm.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a complex scientific instrument inaugurated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the French/Swiss border about 100 m underground. Consisting of a 27 km ring of superconducting magnets with numerous accelerating instruments to increase the energy of the particles in the process, LHC is the newest addition to CERN's accelerator complex.

Inside the LHC, two beams of subatomic particles (hadrons) travel at 11.245 times a second, almost at the speed of light, in opposite directions, gaining energy with every lap before colliding with one another. Physicists use the LHC to rebuild the conditions right after the Big Bang through actual collisions of the two beams at four locations around the accelerator ring. The beams collide at extremely high energy of 7 TeV (tera-electronvolt), which correspond to head-to-head collisions of 14 TeV, while 600 million collisions take place every second in gigantic devices that measure particles with micron precision. Built on highly sophisticated electronic trigger systems, LHC detectors measure incredibly quickly and responsively the elapsed time of a particle in an accuracy of billionths of a second.

The beams are guided around the particles accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field, attained using a total of 9.300 superconducting electromagnets of diverse varieties and sizes. Built from electric cable that

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