What exactly does the Large Hadron Collider do?
The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful accelerator in the world. It boosts particles, such as protons, which form all the matter we know. Accelerated to a speed close to that of light, they collide with other protons. These collisions produce massive particles, such as the Higgs boson or the top quark.
What is Large Hadron Collider in simple words?
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.
What is the Hadron Collider trying to prove?
The machine allows scientists to prove the existence of particles needed to understand the universe and its stability. In 2012, the Hadron Collider was used to famously discovered evidence of the Higgs Boson particle, which provided proof that the Higgs Field exists, which gives mass to elements.
Is the Large Hadron Collider a failure?
Ten years in, the Large Hadron Collider has failed to deliver the exciting discoveries that scientists promised.
What would happen if the Large Hadron Collider exploded?
The impact would be sufficient to completely obliterate a large metropolitan area, gouge a crater about 5 km across and 300 meters deep. (That’s about 3 miles across and 1000 feet deep). This is several times larger than the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona.
What happens if the Hadron Collider goes wrong?
Was the LHC a waste of money?
The LHC hasn’t just lost most of its data: it’s lost a whopping 99.997% of it. That’s right; out of every one million collisions that occurs at the LHC, only about 30 of them have all of their data written down and recorded.
How expensive is the LHC?
about $4.75 billion
The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson.