What does the Hadron Collider do?

The physicists love this device because it breaks up things. No, not their marriages; it breaks up quantum particles into smaller particles. The Large Hadron Collider is the largest particle collider ever built. In fact, it's the greatest scientific instrument ever built by Homo sapiens. It was constructed by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and it has proven its worth, which is 3.74 billion euros, when it was recently used to discover the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that explains why all matter has mass.

This thing is huge. The amazing device is housed in an underground (175 meters) circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometers near Geneva Switzerland. Basically, the device is a synchrotron (particle accelerator) that is able to smash two particles together at from 4 TeV (teraelectronvolts) to 14 TeV. A Teraelectronvolt is ten to the twelfth power electron volts. An electron volt is the energy gained or lost in moving a single electron across a potential difference of one volt. One electron volt is equal to 1.602 times ten to the minus-nineteen-power joules.

The design of the collider is complicated, but it all comes down to the idea of accelerating two particle beams and colliding them at a specific location where the debris of the collision can be monitored. What makes this so complicated is that the particle beams must be inside a vacuum and powerful magnets must be used to keep the particle beams on course around a large circle.

The first thing is to create two particle beams. How do they create these proton beams? They use an ion source, which in the case of a proton is electron bombardment (ionization) of a hydrogen atom. This results in a positive ion, and then they use a cathode (in this case a negative charged element) to attract the protons, which have a positive charge, and then they use magnets to form the protons into a very tight focused beam. This is equivalent to branding cattle and then rounding them up to get them to go into a narrow gated path. After forming proton beams, the accelerator speeds them up by using powerful magnets. These are cryogenically cooled super powerful magnets that send these protons around and around the circle, building up speed and power before smashing them together at near light speed. It's not the speed that's important but rather the power in electron volts that makes all the difference. The fact that the Hadron Collider is so large helps in this task.

Once the beams reach the desired energy level, they are focused into a precise, and I mean very precise, alignment so that the collision is most effective. It is the task of the detectors to record the debris from the collisions. The Hadron Collider has four detectors: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb. Each has a specific purpose. These detectors basically detect radiation. That's a simplified definition. The detectors used in the Hadron Collider are huge and very expensive devices that combine many different kinds of equipment that involve ionization chambers, scintillation counters, solid state or semiconductor detectors, time projection, transition radiation, time of flight, proton spectrometer, muon spectrometer, and many other types that are too complicated. These detectors are often layered like onionskins. All of these instruments are attached to computer interfaces so that data can be collected in real time.

You can think of these detectors as event detectors. When some crazy particle shoots off from the collision point, these detectors can not only determine its energy but also its charge and mass. Quantum physics allows physicists to calculate the spin, charge, energy and mass of quantum particles, so when they see something new from these collisions they can back calculate to determine what the heck it is.

This in a nutshell is what the Large Hadron Collider does, and hopefully it will allow quantum physicists to discover what the heck happened at the instant of the Big Bang.

FYI: I didn't know this before but a superconducting super collider was almost built in Texas. This collider would have been much more powerful and larger then the Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson. It was scrapped after the fall of the Soviet Union and after a lot of money had been spent, which sounds normal for the United States government.

Thanks for reading.