What is the Large Hadron Collider?

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, built by CERN in a massive underground tunnel near Geneva. It accelerates beams of protons or heavy ions to extreme energies before making them collide at designated crossing points. These high-energy collisions allow physicists to test predictions of particle physics, such as studying the Higgs boson and searching for new particles.

What we know

• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. [1, 2]
• The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference and as deep as 175 metres beneath the France-Switzerland border. [2]
• The collider was built by CERN between 1998 and 2008 with international collaboration. [2]
• The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC was announced in 2012. [2]
• The LHC primarily collides proton beams, but can also accelerate beams of heavy ions like lead. [2]

Where to go next

• how we knowHow was the Higgs boson discovered?
• the bigger pictureWhat are elementary particles?
• how it workedHow does particle radiation work?
• whereWhat is CERN?
• whenWhat happened during the 2013 to 2015 LHC upgrade?
• an unexpected connectionHow do subatomic collisions relate to macroscopic particle models?While the LHC studies subatomic elementary particles, the fundamental definition of a particle spans from microscopic atoms all the way up to macroscopic models of human crowds and galaxies.

Sources

• [1]Large Hadron Collider (Wikidata Q40605) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Large Hadron Collider · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Elementary particle · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Particle · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Particle radiation · CC BY-SA 4.0