The LHC - Dangerous To The World?

Will the Large Hadron Collider create a black hole that will destroy the world? No, but it may solve mysteries about the origin of the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing particle beams of either protons at an energy of 7 TeV (1.12 microjoules) per particle, or lead nuclei at an energy of 574 TeV (92.0 microjoules) per nucleus.

The term hadron refers to such particles that are composed of quarks. It is expected that it will address the most fundamental questions of physics, hopefully allowing progress in understanding the deepest laws of nature. The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as much as 175 metres (570 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

In September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Repairing the resulting damage and installing additional safety features took over a year. In November 2009 the proton beams were successfully circulated again and the first proton-proton collisions were recorded, at the injection energy of 450 GeV per particle.

In December 2009, the LHC was shut down after its initial commissioning run, which achieved proton collision energies of 2.36 TeV, with multiple bunches of protons circulating for several hours and data from over one million proton-proton collisions. The LHC resumed operations in February 2010, but it will operate at only half of the design collision energy. In 2012 it will be shut down for the repairs necessary to bring it to its full design energy, and then it will start up again in 2013.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ha...

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• http://www.calacademy.org/