AT 27 KILOMETRES long, it is the largest machine in the world. It will accelerate counterrotating beams of protons to within a whisker of the speed of light and smash them head-on 600 million times a second. The most distinctive feature of the Large Hadron Collider, though, is its temperature. At 1.9 kelvin – a smidgen above absolute zero – the LHC is the coldest ring in the universe, unless an alien civilisation has built one that is colder.
Were it not for this searing cold, the LHC might have suffered the same fate as the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which was on its way to becoming the most powerful accelerator in the world before the US government canned it in 1993. The SSC’s partially completed tunnel, near Waxahachie, Texas, now lies derelict – killed by a ballooning budget and a deficit of innovation.
Keen to avoid a similar debacle, CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, took the momentous decision to cram the LHC into an existing circular tunnel 100 metres underground, which had been built in the 1980s for the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider. It was a decision that led to a carefully choreographed dance of extreme engineering. Underground rivers were frozen in mid flow, components shipped around the world and superconductors pushed to their limits.
One of the tasks planned for the SSC ring was to search for the Higgs boson, the particle through which the universe is thought to get its mass. It would have meant smashing protons into each other at energies of 40 teraelectronvolts (TeV). To get …
No commitment, cancel anytime*
Offer ends 19/10/2022. *Cancel anytime within 14 days of payment to receive a refund on unserved issues.
Existing subscribers, please log in with your email address to link your account access.
Inclusive of applicable taxes (VAT)