How the Large Hadron Collider Works

The Large Hadron Collider will answer some of the most basic questions about the universe:

At the Heart of All Matter

From the article:

Starting sometime in the coming months, two beams of particles will race in opposite directions around the tunnel, which forms an underground ring 17 miles in circumference. The particles will be guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages. At four locations the beams will converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.

See also:

This is an old article, but it lays out one of the types of experiments that might be done with the Large Hadron Collider:

Artificial black holes: on the threshold of new physics

From the article:

For several decades now, there has been a fundamental problem with modern physics. The problem is actually an embarrassment of riches: we have not one, but two systems that describe the universe remarkably well. One is quantum mechanics, which describes the rich and subtle behavior of waves and particles. The other system, general relativity combines space and time into one continuum, providing us with the best description of the movement of the planets and the expansion of the universe.

Scientists have realized that to truly understand the universe, we’ve got to make these two systems work together, even merge into a single, more accurate depiction of reality. But the two systems have not given up their independent identities easily. The challenge has been to find conditions in the universe where both the effects of quantum mechanics and general relativity are significant and measurable.

For this to be the case, you’ve got to pack a whole lot of mass (as general relativity mainly relates to gravity), into an extremely tiny volume (where quantum effects become important). Where do you think those conditions might exist? Fortunately, the universe has provided us with such a natural laboratory for fundamental physics: black holes.

The Large Hadron Collider will make it possible to create small black holes:

Amazingly, scientists are becoming increasingly confident that they will be able to create black holes on demand, in quantity, using the new atom-smashers due to come online in the next five years. Some estimates suggest that the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN -the acronym is in French) will be able to create an average of one black hole each second. LHC will bombard protons and antiprotons together with such a force that the collision will create temperatures and energy densities not seen since the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. This should be enough to pop off numerous tiny black holes, with masses of just a few hundred protons. Black holes of this size will evaporate almost instantly, their existence detectable only by dying bursts of Hawking radiation.

See also: A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions

The day it turns on will be a moment of truth for Cern, which has spent 13 years building the collider, and for the world’s physicists, who have staked their credibility and their careers, not to mention all those billions of dollars, on the conviction that they are within touching distance of fundamental discoveries about the universe. If they fail to see something new, experts agree, it could be a long time, if ever, before giant particle accelerators are built on Earth again, ringing down the curtain on at least one aspect of the age-old quest to understand what the world is made of and how it works.

“If you see nothing,” said a Cern physicist, John Ellis, “in some sense then, we theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years.”