What is happening at CERN this weekend?

Question

I keep hearing things about it, and I have a general idea about what happens there, but what are they doing with this particular experiment and what is all the "fuss" about?

Answer 1

Basically, they are doing a test firing on the tenth of September at 10 TeV (terra electron volts) and will raise it to up to 14/15 TeV in the near future.

How it works is that they fire lots of protons around these enormous rings, surrounded in electromagnets at close to the speed of light. They have two sets going in opposite directions, and when they collide, they 'smash' together in the highest ever concentration of energy that humankind has ever produced (even if it is within a space a trillionth the size of a spec of dust).

When this happens lots of subatomic particles fly out. These are measured using large detectors which are metres thick, the largest of which is known as ATLAS (suitably titanic). They are looking for a selection of relatively unknown particles, such as supersymetric particles, which may provide insights into the nature of dark matter, and the Higgs Boson, which supposedly gives things mass.

The reason CERN is so much better than the others is that they can fire larger things faster, and the higher energy the collision, the heavier particles are that it releases. The increase in firepower and better detectors provided at CERN means that it's possible to search for larger things than before, and hence there may be a lot of totally undiscovered new particles out there - or there may be none at all, but we'd like to think that we don't yet have all the pieces to the puzzle.

Hope that helps :)

Answer 2

oh they are trying to create conditions that existed just after a few milliseconds of big bang in LHC (which is off course located near the border of France and Switzerland). there are speculations about the formation of new black holes too. this experiment is certainly going to produce new particles on the atomic level.

i suppose the date of the experiment is 10th september

Answer 3

The comissioning of the collider has just been completed, prior to a test firing due on the 10th September;

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRele...

Answer 4

Do you mean with the large hadron collider going on line?