What is the hadron collider for? Why is the Large Hadron Collider needed at all? Other fundamental experiments carried out as part of the work of the LHC
Abbreviated LHC (eng. Large Hadron Collider, abbreviated as LHC) is a charged particle accelerator in colliding beams, designed to accelerate protons and heavy ions (lead ions) and study the products of their collisions. The collider is built at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research), located near Geneva, on the border of Switzerland and France. The LHC is the largest experimental facility in the world. More than 10,000 scientists and engineers from more than 100 countries have participated and are participating in construction and research.
It is named large because of its size: the length of the main ring of the accelerator is 26,659 m; hadronic - due to the fact that it accelerates hadrons, that is, heavy particles consisting of quarks; collider (English collider - collider) - due to the fact that particle beams are accelerated in opposite directions and collide at special collision points.
Specifications
The accelerator is supposed to collide protons with a total energy of 14 TeV (that is, 14 teraelectronvolts or 14 1012 electron volts) in the center of mass system of incident particles, as well as lead nuclei with an energy of 5 GeV (5 109 electron volts) for each pair of colliding nucleons. At the beginning of 2010, the LHC had already somewhat surpassed the previous champion in terms of proton energy - the proton-antiproton collider Tevatron, which until the end of 2011 worked at the National Accelerator Laboratory. Enrico Fermi (USA). Despite the fact that the adjustment of the equipment stretches for years and has not yet been completed, the LHC has already become the highest energy particle accelerator in the world, surpassing other colliders in energy by an order of magnitude, including the RHIC relativistic heavy ion collider operating at the Brookhaven Laboratory (USA). ).
The luminosity of the LHC during the first weeks of the run was no more than 1029 particles/cm 2 s, however, it continues to increase constantly. The goal is to achieve a nominal luminosity of 1.7·1034 particles/cm 2 s, which is in order of magnitude equal to the luminosities of BaBar (SLAC, USA) and Belle (English) (KEK, Japan).
The accelerator is located in the same tunnel formerly occupied by the Large Electron-Positron Collider. The tunnel with a circumference of 26.7 km was laid underground in France and Switzerland. The depth of the tunnel is from 50 to 175 meters, and the tunnel ring is inclined by about 1.4% relative to the earth's surface. To hold, correct and focus proton beams, 1624 superconducting magnets are used, the total length of which exceeds 22 km. The magnets operate at a temperature of 1.9 K (-271 °C), which is slightly below the superfluid temperature of helium.
LHC detectors
The LHC has 4 main and 3 auxiliary detectors:
- ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)
- ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
- CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid)
- LHCb (The Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment)
- TOTEM (TOTal Elastic and diffractive cross section Measurement)
- LHCf (The Large Hadron Collider forward)
- MoEDAL (Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC).
ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb are large detectors located around beam collision points. The TOTEM and LHCf detectors are auxiliary, located at a distance of several tens of meters from the beam intersection points occupied by the CMS and ATLAS detectors, respectively, and will be used along with the main ones.
The ATLAS and CMS detectors are general-purpose detectors designed to search for the Higgs boson and "non-standard physics", in particular dark matter, ALICE - to study quark-gluon plasma in heavy lead ion collisions, LHCb - to study the physics of b-quarks, which will allow to better understand the differences between matter and antimatter, TOTEM is designed to study the scattering of particles at small angles, such as occurs during close spans without collisions (the so-called non-colliding particles, forward particles), which allows you to more accurately measure the size of protons, as well as control the luminosity of the collider, and, finally, LHCf - for the study of cosmic rays, modeled using the same non-colliding particles.
The seventh detector (experiment) MoEDAL, designed to search for slowly moving heavy particles, is also associated with the operation of the LHC.
During the operation of the collider, collisions are carried out simultaneously at all four points of intersection of the beams, regardless of the type of accelerated particles (protons or nuclei). At the same time, all detectors collect statistics simultaneously.
Acceleration of particles in a collider
The speed of particles in the LHC on colliding beams is close to the speed of light in vacuum. The acceleration of particles to such high energies is achieved in several stages. In the first stage, low-energy Linac 2 and Linac 3 linear accelerators inject protons and lead ions for further acceleration. Then the particles enter the PS booster and then into the PS (proton synchrotron) itself, acquiring an energy of 28 GeV. With this energy, they are already moving at a speed close to light. After that, particle acceleration continues in the SPS (Proton Super Synchrotron), where the particle energy reaches 450 GeV. Then the bunch of protons is sent to the main 26.7-kilometer ring, bringing the energy of the protons to a maximum of 7 TeV, and at the collision points, the detectors record the events that occur. Two colliding proton beams, when completely filled, can contain 2808 bunches each. At the initial stages of debugging the acceleration process, only one bunch circulates in a bundle several centimeters long and of small transverse size. Then they begin to increase the number of clots. The clusters are located in fixed positions relative to each other, which move synchronously along the ring. The clumps in a certain sequence can collide at four points of the ring, where the particle detectors are located.
The kinetic energy of all hadron bunches in the LHC when it is completely filled is comparable to the kinetic energy of a jet aircraft, although the mass of all particles does not exceed a nanogram and they cannot even be seen with the naked eye. Such energy is achieved due to the speed of particles close to the speed of light.
The bunches go through a full circle of the accelerator faster than 0.0001 sec, thus making more than 10 thousand revolutions per second
Goals and objectives of the LHC
The main task of the Large Hadron Collider is to find out the structure of our world at distances less than 10–19 m, "probing" it with particles with an energy of several TeV. To date, a lot of indirect evidence has already accumulated that on this scale, physicists should open up a certain “new layer of reality”, the study of which will provide answers to many questions of fundamental physics. What exactly this layer of reality will turn out to be is not known in advance. Theorists, of course, have already proposed hundreds of various phenomena that could be observed at collision energies of several TeV, but it is the experiment that will show what is actually realized in nature.
Search for New Physics The Standard Model cannot be considered the ultimate theory of elementary particles. It must be part of some deeper theory of the structure of the microworld, the part that is visible in collider experiments at energies below about 1 TeV. Such theories are collectively referred to as "New Physics" or "Beyond the Standard Model". The main task of the Large Hadron Collider is to get at least the first hints of what this deeper theory is. To further combine fundamental interactions in one theory, various approaches are used: string theory, which was developed in M-theory (brane theory), supergravity theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. Some of them have internal problems, and none of them have experimental confirmation. The problem is that to carry out the corresponding experiments, energies are needed that are unattainable at modern particle accelerators. The LHC will enable experiments that were previously impossible and will likely confirm or disprove some of these theories. Thus, there is a whole range of physical theories with dimensions greater than four that suggest the existence of "supersymmetry" - for example, string theory, which is sometimes called superstring theory precisely because without supersymmetry it loses its physical meaning. Confirmation of the existence of supersymmetry would thus be an indirect confirmation of the truth of these theories. Studying top quarks The top quark is the heaviest quark and, moreover, it is the heaviest elementary particle discovered so far. According to the latest results from the Tevatron, its mass is 173.1 ± 1.3 GeV/c 2 . Because of its large mass, the top quark has so far been observed only at one accelerator, the Tevatron; other accelerators simply lacked the energy to produce it. In addition, top quarks are of interest to physicists not only in their own right, but also as a “working tool” for studying the Higgs boson. One of the most important channels for the production of the Higgs boson at the LHC is the associative production together with the top quark-antiquark pair. In order to reliably separate such events from the background, it is first necessary to study the properties of the top quarks themselves. Studying the mechanism of electroweak symmetry One of the main goals of the project is to experimentally prove the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs in 1964 within the framework of the Standard Model. The Higgs boson is a quantum of the so-called Higgs field, when passing through which the particles experience resistance, which we represent as corrections to the mass. The boson itself is unstable and has a large mass (more than 120 GeV/c2). In fact, physicists are not so much interested in the Higgs boson itself, but in the Higgs mechanism of symmetry breaking of the electroweak interaction. Study of quark-gluon plasma It is expected that approximately one month per year will be spent in the accelerator in the mode of nuclear collisions. During this month, the collider will accelerate and collide in detectors not protons, but lead nuclei. In an inelastic collision of two nuclei at ultrarelativistic speeds, a dense and very hot lump of nuclear matter is formed for a short time and then decays. Understanding the phenomena occurring in this case (the transition of matter to the state of quark-gluon plasma and its cooling) is necessary to construct a more perfect theory of strong interactions, which will be useful both for nuclear physics and for astrophysics. The search for supersymmetry The first significant scientific achievement of experiments at the LHC may be the proof or refutation of "supersymmetry" - the theory that any elementary particle has a much heavier partner, or "superparticle". Study of photon-hadron and photon-photon collisions The electromagnetic interaction of particles is described as an exchange of (in some cases virtual) photons. In other words, photons are carriers of the electromagnetic field. Protons are electrically charged and surrounded by an electrostatic field, respectively, this field can be considered as a cloud of virtual photons. Any proton, especially a relativistic proton, includes a cloud of virtual particles as an integral part. When protons collide with each other, the virtual particles surrounding each of the protons also interact. Mathematically, the process of particle interaction is described by a long series of corrections, each of which describes the interaction by means of virtual particles of a certain type (see: Feynman diagrams). Thus, when studying the collision of protons, the interaction of matter with high-energy photons, which is of great interest for theoretical physics, is also indirectly studied. A special class of reactions is also considered - the direct interaction of two photons, which can collide both with an oncoming proton, generating typical photon-hadron collisions, and with each other. In the mode of nuclear collisions, due to the large electric charge of the nucleus, the influence of electromagnetic processes is even more important. Testing exotic theories Theorists at the end of the 20th century put forward a huge number of unusual ideas about the structure of the world, which are collectively called "exotic models". These include theories with strong gravity on an energy scale of the order of 1 TeV, models with a large number of spatial dimensions, preon models in which quarks and leptons themselves are composed of particles, models with new types of interaction. The fact is that the accumulated experimental data is still not enough to create a single theory. And all these theories themselves are compatible with the available experimental data. Since these theories can make specific predictions for the LHC, experimenters plan to test the predictions and look for traces of certain theories in their data. It is expected that the results obtained at the accelerator will be able to limit the imagination of theorists, closing some of the proposed constructions. Other It is also expected to detect physical phenomena outside the framework of the Standard Model. It is planned to study the properties of W and Z bosons, nuclear interactions at superhigh energies, the processes of production and decay of heavy quarks (b and t).
Many ordinary inhabitants of the planet ask themselves the question of why the Large Hadron Collider is needed. Scientific research, incomprehensible to most, for which many billions of euros have been spent, causes alertness and apprehension.
Maybe this is not research at all, but a prototype of a time machine or a portal for teleportation of alien beings that can change the fate of mankind? Rumors go the most fantastic and terrible. In the article we will try to figure out what a hadron collider is and why it was created.
Ambitious project of humanity
The Large Hadron Collider is currently the most powerful particle accelerator on the planet. It is located on the border of Switzerland and France. More precisely, under it: at a depth of 100 meters, there is an annular accelerator tunnel almost 27 kilometers long. The owner of the experimental site worth more than 10 billion dollars is the European Center for Nuclear Research.
A huge amount of resources and thousands of nuclear physicists are engaged in accelerating protons and heavy lead ions to the speed close to the speed of light in different directions, after which they collide with each other. The results of direct interactions are carefully studied.
The proposal to create a new particle accelerator was received back in 1984. For ten years there have been various discussions about what the hadron collider will look like, why such a large-scale research project is needed. Only after discussing the issues of the technical solution features and the required parameters of the installation, the project was approved. Construction began only in 2001, having allocated for its placement the former accelerator of elementary particles - a large electron-positron collider.
Why is the Large Hadron Collider needed?
The interaction of elementary particles is described in different ways. The theory of relativity comes into conflict with quantum field theory. The missing link in finding a unified approach to the structure of elementary particles is the impossibility of creating a theory of quantum gravity. That's why we need a high-powered hadron collider.
The total energy in the collision of particles is 14 teraelectronvolts, which makes the device a much more powerful accelerator than all existing in the world today. Having carried out experiments that were previously impossible for technical reasons, scientists with a high degree of probability will be able to document or refute the existing theories of the microworld.
The study of quark-gluon plasma formed during the collision of lead nuclei will allow us to build a more advanced theory of strong interactions, which can radically change nuclear physics and stellar space.
Higgs boson
Back in 1960, Scottish physicist Peter Higgs developed the theory of the Higgs field, according to which particles entering this field are subjected to quantum action, which in the physical world can be observed as the mass of an object.
If during the experiments it is possible to confirm the theory of the Scottish nuclear physicist and find the Higgs boson (quantum), then this event can become a new starting point for the development of the inhabitants of the Earth.
And the discovered gravity controllers will many times exceed all the visible prospects for the development of technical progress. Moreover, advanced scientists are more interested not in the very presence of the Higgs boson, but in the process of breaking electroweak symmetry.
How does he work
In order for the experimental particles to reach a speed unthinkable for a surface, almost equal to that in a vacuum, they are accelerated gradually, each time increasing the energy.
First, linear accelerators inject lead ions and protons, which are then subjected to stepped acceleration. Particles through the booster enter the proton synchrotron, where they receive a charge of 28 GeV.
At the next stage, the particles enter the super-synchrotron, where the energy of their charge is brought up to 450 GeV. Having reached such indicators, the particles fall into the main multi-kilometer ring, where detectors record the moment of collision in specially located collision points.
In addition to detectors capable of detecting all processes during a collision, 1625 superconducting magnets are used to keep proton bunches in the accelerator. Their total length exceeds 22 kilometers. Special to achieve maintains a temperature of -271 °C. The cost of each such magnet is estimated at one million euros.
End justifies the means
To conduct such ambitious experiments, the most powerful hadron collider was built. Why do we need a multibillion-dollar scientific project, many scientists tell humanity with undisguised delight. True, in the case of new scientific discoveries, most likely, they will be reliably classified.
You can even say for sure. This is confirmed by the entire history of civilization. When the wheel was invented, mankind mastered metallurgy - hello, guns and guns!
All the most modern developments today become the property of the military-industrial complexes of developed countries, but not of all mankind. When scientists learned how to split an atom, what came first? Nuclear reactors that provide electricity, however, after hundreds of thousands of deaths in Japan. The people of Hiroshima were unequivocally opposed to scientific progress, which took tomorrow from them and their children.
Technical development looks like a mockery of people, because the person in it will soon turn into the weakest link. According to the theory of evolution, the system develops and grows stronger, getting rid of weak points. It may soon turn out that there will be no place left for us in the world of improving technology. Therefore, the question "why is the Large Hadron Collider needed right now" is actually not an idle curiosity, because it is caused by fear for the fate of all mankind.
Questions not answered
Why do we need a large hadron collider, if millions of people on the planet die of hunger and incurable, and sometimes treatable diseases? Will he help overcome this evil? Why does humanity need a hadron collider, which, with all the development of technology, has not been able to learn how to successfully fight cancer for more than a hundred years? Or maybe it's just more profitable to provide expensive medical services than to find a way to heal? With the existing world order and ethical development, only a handful of representatives of the human race are in dire need of a large hadron collider. Why does the entire population of the planet need it, leading a non-stop battle for the right to live in a world free from encroachments on anyone's life and health? History is silent on this...
Fear of scientific colleagues
There are other representatives of the scientific community who express serious concerns about the safety of the project. There is a high probability that the scientific world in its experiments, due to its limited knowledge, may lose control over processes that have not even been properly studied.
This approach is reminiscent of the laboratory experiments of young chemists - mix everything and see what happens. The last example can end with an explosion in the laboratory. And if such a "success" befalls the hadron collider?
Why do earthlings need an unjustified risk, especially since experimenters cannot say with full confidence that the processes of particle collisions, leading to the formation of temperatures exceeding the temperature of our star by 100 thousand times, will not cause a chain reaction of the entire substance of the planet?! Or they will simply call for something that can fatally ruin a vacation in the mountains of Switzerland or in the French Riviera ...
Information dictatorship
What is the Large Hadron Collider for when mankind cannot solve less complex problems? An attempt to hush up an alternative opinion only confirms the possibility of unpredictability of the course of events.
Probably, where a person first appeared, this dual feature was laid in him - to do good and harm himself at the same time. Perhaps the answer will be given by the discoveries that the hadron collider will give? Why this risky experiment was needed, our descendants will decide.
The most powerful colliding particle accelerator in the world
The world's most powerful colliding beam accelerator built by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in a 27-kilometer underground tunnel at a depth of 50-175 meters on the border of Switzerland and France. The LHC was launched in the fall of 2008, but due to an accident, experiments on it began only in November 2009, and it reached its design capacity in March 2010. The launch of the collider attracted the attention of not only physicists, but also ordinary people, as fears were expressed in the media that experiments at the collider could lead to the end of the world. In July 2012, the LHC announced the discovery of a particle with a high probability of being the Higgs boson - its existence confirmed the correctness of the Standard Model of the structure of matter.
background
For the first time, particle accelerators began to be used in science in the late 20s of the XX century to study the properties of matter. The first ring accelerator, the cyclotron, was created in 1931 by the American physicist Ernest Lawrence. In 1932, the Englishman John Cockcroft and the Irishman Ernest Walton, using a voltage multiplier and the world's first proton accelerator, managed to for the first time artificially split the nucleus of an atom: helium was obtained by bombarding lithium with protons. Particle accelerators are powered by electric fields that are used to accelerate (in many cases to speeds close to the speed of light) and keep charged particles (such as electrons, protons, or heavier ions) on a given path. The simplest household example of accelerators is electron ray tube televisions,,,,,.
Accelerators are used for a variety of experiments, including the production of superheavy elements. To study elementary particles, colliders are also used (from collide - "collision") - accelerators of charged particles in colliding beams, designed to study the products of their collisions. Scientists give the beams large kinetic energies. Collisions can produce new, previously unknown particles. Special detectors are designed to catch their appearance. At the beginning of the 1990s, the most powerful colliders operated in the USA and Switzerland. In 1987, the Tevatron collider was launched in the United States near Chicago with a maximum beam energy of 980 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). It is an underground ring 6.3 kilometers long,,. In 1989, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) was put into operation in Switzerland under the auspices of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). For him, at a depth of 50-175 meters in the valley of Lake Geneva, an annular tunnel 26.7 kilometers long was built, in 2000 it was possible to achieve a beam energy of 209 GeV , , .
In the USSR in the 1980s, a project was created for the Accelerator-Storage Complex (UNC) - a superconducting proton-proton collider at the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino. It would be superior in most parameters to the LEP and the Tevatron, and would have made it possible to accelerate beams of elementary particles with an energy of 3 teraelectronvolts (TeV). Its main ring, 21 kilometers long, was built underground in 1994, but due to lack of funds, the project was frozen in 1998, the tunnel built in Protvino was mothballed (only elements of the upper stage were completed), and the chief engineer of the project, Gennady Durov, left for work in the USA , , , , , , , . According to some Russian scientists, if the UNK had been completed and put into operation, there would have been no need to create more powerful colliders , , : it was suggested that in order to obtain new data on the physical foundations of the world order, it would be enough to overcome the energy threshold of 1 TeV on accelerators , . Deputy Director of the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics of Moscow State University and coordinator of the participation of Russian institutions in the project to create the Large Hadron Collider Viktor Savrin, recalling the UNC, said: "Well, three teraelectronvolts or seven. And then three teraelectronvolts could be brought to five later." However, the United States also abandoned the construction of its own Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) in 1993, and for financial reasons,,.
Instead of building their own colliders, physicists from different countries decided to unite within the framework of an international project, the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating which originated back in the 1980s,. After the end of the experiments at the Swiss LEP, its equipment was dismantled, and in its place, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, Large Hadron Collider, LHC) began - the world's most powerful ring accelerator of charged particles on colliding beams, on which proton beams with energies collisions up to 14 TeV and lead ions with collision energies up to 1150 TeV , , , , , .
Goals of the experiment
The main goal of the construction of the LHC was to refine or refute the Standard Model - a theoretical construction in physics that describes elementary particles and three of the four fundamental interactions: strong, weak and electromagnetic, with the exception of gravitational, . The formation of the Standard Model was completed in the 1960-1970s, and all the discoveries made since then, according to scientists, were described by natural extensions of this theory,. At the same time, the Standard Model explained how elementary particles interact, but did not answer the question why in this way and not otherwise.
Scientists noted that if the LHC had failed to achieve the discovery of the Higgs boson (in the press it was sometimes called the "God particle", , ) - this would call into question the entire Standard Model, which would require a complete revision of existing ideas about elementary particles , , , , . At the same time, if the Standard Model was confirmed, some areas of physics required further experimental verification: in particular, it was necessary to prove the existence of "gravitons" - hypothetical particles responsible for gravity , , .
Technical features
The LHC is located in a tunnel built for the LEP. Most of it lies under the territory of France. The tunnel contains two pipes, which run parallel for almost their entire length and intersect at the locations of the detectors, in which hadrons - particles consisting of quarks - will collide (lead ions and protons will be used for collisions). Protons begin to accelerate not in the LHC itself, but in auxiliary accelerators. Proton beams "start" in the LINAC2 linear accelerator, then in the PS accelerator, after which they enter the ring of the super proton synchrotron (SPS) 6.9 kilometers long and after that they end up in one of the LHC tubes, where for another 20 minutes they energy up to 7 TeV will be imparted. Experiments with lead ions will begin at the LINAC3 linear accelerator. The beams are held in place by 1,600 superconducting magnets, many of which weigh up to 27 tons. These magnets are cooled by liquid helium to an ultra-low temperature: 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than outer space, , , , , , , .
At a speed of 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, making more than 11 thousand circles per second around the collider ring, protons will collide in one of the four detectors - the most complex systems of the LHC , , , , , . The ATLAS detector is designed to search for new unknown particles that can suggest ways for scientists to search for "new physics" that is different from the Standard Model. The CMS detector is designed to obtain the Higgs boson and study dark matter. The ALICE detector is designed to study matter after the Big Bang and search for quark-gluon plasma, and the LHCb detector will investigate the reason for the prevalence of matter over antimatter and explore the physics of b-quarks,. Three more detectors are planned to be put into operation in the future: TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL, .
To process the results of experiments at the LHC, a dedicated distributed computer network GRID will be used, capable of transmitting up to 10 gigabits of information per second to 11 computer centers around the world. Each year more than 15 petabytes (15 thousand terabytes) of information will be read from the detectors: the total data flow of four experiments can reach 700 megabytes per second, , , , . In September 2008, hackers managed to break into the CERN web page and, according to them, gain access to the management of the collider. However, CERN staff explained that the LHC control system is isolated from the internet. In October 2009, Adlen Ishor, who was one of the scientists working on the LHCb experiment at the LHC, was arrested on suspicion of collaborating with terrorists. However, according to the CERN management, Ishor did not have access to the underground premises of the collider and did not do anything that could interest the terrorists,. In May 2012, Ishor was sentenced to five years in prison.
Cost and construction history
In 1995, the cost of creating the LHC was estimated at 2.6 billion Swiss francs, excluding the cost of conducting experiments. It was planned that the experiments would have to begin in 10 years - in 2005. In 2001, the CERN budget was cut and 480 million francs were added to the construction cost (the total cost of the project at that time was about 3 billion francs), and this led to the launch of the collider being postponed until 2007. In 2005, an engineer died during the construction of the LHC: the cause of the tragedy was a load falling from a crane.
The launch of the LHC was postponed not only because of funding problems. In 2007, it turned out that parts supplied by Fermilab for superconducting magnets did not meet the design requirements, which caused the launch of the collider to be postponed by a year.
On September 10, 2008, the first proton beam was launched at the LHC. It was planned that in a few months the first collisions would be carried out at the collider, however, on September 19, due to a defective connection of two superconducting magnets, an accident occurred at the LHC: the magnets were disabled, more than 6 tons of liquid helium poured into the tunnel, and the vacuum was broken in the accelerator pipes . The collider had to be closed for repairs. Despite the accident, on September 21, 2008, a solemn ceremony was held to put the LHC into operation. Initially, the experiments were going to be resumed in December 2008, but then the re-launch date was postponed to September, and then to mid-November 2009, while the first collisions were planned to be held only in 2010,,,. The first test launches of beams of lead ions and protons on part of the LHC ring after the accident were made on October 23, 2009,. On November 23, the first beam collisions were made in the ATLAS detector, and on March 31, 2010, the collider started working at full capacity: on that day, a collision of proton beams at a record energy of 7 TeV was registered. In April 2012, an even higher proton collision energy was recorded - 8 TeV.
In 2009, the cost of the LHC was estimated at between 3.2 and 6.4 billion euros, making it the most expensive scientific experiment in human history.
The international cooperation
It was noted that a LHC-scale project cannot be created by one country. It was created by the efforts of not only 20 CERN member states: more than 10 thousand scientists from more than a hundred countries of the globe took part in its development,,. Since 2009, the LHC project has been led by CERN CEO Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Russia also takes part in the creation of the LHC as an observer member of CERN: in 2008, about 700 Russian scientists worked at the Large Hadron Collider, including employees of IHEP,.
Meanwhile, scientists from one of the European countries almost lost the opportunity to take part in experiments at the LHC. In May 2009, Austrian Minister of Science Johannes Hahn announced the country's withdrawal from CERN in 2010, explaining that membership in CERN and participation in the LHC creation program is too costly and does not bring tangible returns to science and universities in Austria. It was about the possible annual savings of about 20 million euros, representing 2.2 percent of the CERN budget and about 70 percent of the funds allocated by the Austrian government for participation in international research organizations. Austria promised to make the final decision on withdrawal in autumn 2009 . However, later Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said that his country was not going to leave the project and CERN.
Rumors of danger
Rumors circulated in the press that the LHC was a danger to humanity, since its launch could lead to the end of the world. The reason was the statements of scientists that as a result of collisions in the collider microscopic black holes could form: opinions immediately appeared that they could "suck" the entire Earth in them, and therefore the LHC is a real "Pandora's box" , , , . Opinions were also expressed that the discovery of the Higgs boson would lead to an uncontrolled increase in mass in the Universe, and experiments to search for "dark matter" could lead to the appearance of "strangelets" (strangelets, the translation of the term into Russian belongs to astronomer Sergei Popov) - "strange matter ", which, when in contact with ordinary matter, can turn it into a "strapelle". At the same time, a comparison was made with the novel by Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Vonnegut) "Cat's Cradle", where the fictional material "ice-nine" destroyed life on the planet,. Some publications, referring to the opinions of individual scientists, also stated that experiments at the LHC can lead to the appearance of "wormholes" (wormholes) in time, through which particles or even living beings can be transferred to our world from the future,. However, it turned out that the words of scientists were distorted and misinterpreted by journalists: initially it was "about microscopic time machines, with the help of which only individual elementary particles can travel into the past",.
Scientists have repeatedly stated that the likelihood of such events is negligible. A special LHC Safety Assessment Group was even assembled, which conducted an analysis and issued a report on the likelihood of disasters that experiments at the LHC can lead to. According to scientists, proton collisions at the LHC will be no more dangerous than collisions of cosmic rays with astronauts' spacesuits: they sometimes have even greater energy than what can be achieved in the LHC. And as for the hypothetical black holes, they will "dissolve" before reaching even the walls of the collider , , , , , .
However, rumors of possible catastrophes still kept the public in suspense. The creators of the collider were even sued: the most famous lawsuits belonged to the American lawyer and physician Walter Wagner and German chemistry professor Otto Rossler. They accused CERN of endangering humanity with their experiment and violating the "right to life" guaranteed by the Convention on Human Rights, but the claims were rejected by , , , . The press reported that due to rumors about the imminent end of the world, after the launch of the LHC in India, a 16-year-old girl committed suicide.
In the Russian blogosphere, a meme "I would rather have a collider" appeared, which can be translated as "It would be the end of the world, it is impossible to look at this disgrace anymore." The joke "Physicists have a tradition - once every 14 billion years to gather and launch a collider" was popular.
Scientific results
The first data from experiments at the LHC were published in December 2009 . On December 13, 2011, CERN experts announced that as a result of research at the LHC, they managed to narrow the boundaries of the probable mass of the Higgs boson to 115.5-127 GeV and find signs of the existence of the desired particle with a mass of about 126 GeV,. In the same month, the discovery of a new non-Higgs particle, called χb (3P) , , was announced for the first time during experiments at the LHC.
On July 4, 2012, the CERN leadership officially announced the discovery with a probability of 99.99995 percent of a new particle in the mass region of about 126 GeV, which, according to scientists, was most likely the Higgs boson. This result, the head of one of the two scientific collaborations working at the LHC, Joe Incandela (Joe Incandela) called "one of the greatest observations in this field of science over the past 30-40 years," and Peter Higgs himself declared the discovery of the particle "the end of an era in physics ", , .
Future projects
In 2013, CERN plans to modernize the LHC by installing more powerful detectors and increasing the overall power of the collider. The upgrade project is called the Super Large Hadron Collider (SLHC). The construction of the International Linear Collider (ILC) is also planned. Its pipe will be several tens of kilometers long, and it should be cheaper than the LHC due to the fact that its design does not require the use of expensive superconducting magnets. It is possible that the ILC will be built in Dubna,,.
Also, some CERN experts and scientists from the USA and Japan suggested that after the completion of the work of the LHC, work on a new Very Large Hadron Collider (Very Large Hadron Collider, VLHC) ,.
Used materials
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Yes, we did it! - CERN Bulletin, 31.03.2010
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A few facts about the Large Hadron Collider, how and why it was created, what is the use of it and what potential dangers for humanity it poses.
1. The construction of the LHC, or the Large Hadron Collider, was conceived back in 1984, and began only in 2001. Five years later, in 2006, thanks to the efforts of more than 10 thousand engineers and scientists from different countries, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider was completed.
2. The LHC is the largest experimental facility in the world.
3.
So why the Large Hadron Collider?
It was named large due to its solid size: the length of the main ring, along which the particles are driven, is about 27 km.
Hadron - since the installation accelerates hadrons (particles that consist of quarks).
Collider - due to particle beams accelerating in the opposite direction, which collide with each other at special points.
4. What is the Large Hadron Collider for? The LHC is an ultra-modern research center where scientists conduct experiments with atoms, pushing ions and protons together at great speed. Scientists hope with the help of research to lift the veil over the mysteries of the appearance of the universe.
5. The project cost the scientific community an astronomical sum of $6 billion. By the way, Russia has delegated 700 specialists to the LHC, who are still working today. Orders for LHC brought about $120 million to Russian enterprises.
6. Without a doubt, the main discovery made at the LHC is the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson, or as it is also called “God particles”. The Higgs boson is the last link in the Standard Model. Another significant event in Bak'e is the achievement of a record collision energy value of 2.36 teraelectronvolts.
7. Some scientists, including those in Russia, believe that thanks to large-scale experiments at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where, in fact, the collider is located), scientists will be able to build the world's first time machine. However, most scientists do not share the optimism of colleagues.
8. The main fears of humanity about the most powerful accelerator on the planet are based on the danger that threatens humanity as a result of the formation of microscopic black holes capable of capturing the surrounding matter. There is another potential and extremely dangerous threat - the emergence of strandels (derived from Strange droplet), which, hypothetically, are capable of colliding with the nucleus of an atom to form more and more new strands, transforming the matter of the entire Universe. However, most of the most respected scientists say that such an outcome is unlikely. But it is theoretically possible
9. In 2008, CERN was sued by two residents of the state of Hawaii. They accused CERN of trying to end humanity through negligence, demanding safety guarantees from scientists.
10. The Large Hadron Collider is located in Switzerland near Geneva. There is a museum at CERN, where visitors are clearly explained about the principles of the collider and why it was built.
11 . And finally, a little fun fact. Judging by the requests in Yandex, many people who are looking for information about the Large Hadron Collider do not know how to spell the name of the accelerator. For example, they write “andron” (and not only write what the NTV reports with their andron collider are worth), sometimes they write “android” (the Empire strikes back). In the bourgeois net, they also do not lag behind and instead of “hadron” they drive “hardon” into the search engine (in Orthodox English, hard-on is a riser). An interesting spelling in Belarusian is “Vyaliki hadronny paskaralnik”, which translates as “Big hadron accelerator”.
Hadron Collider. Photo
The phrase "Large Hadron Collider" has become so deeply embedded in the mass media that an overwhelming number of people know about this facility, including those whose activities are in no way connected with elementary particle physics, and with science in general.
Indeed, such a large-scale and expensive project could not be ignored by the media - a ring installation with a length of almost 27 kilometers, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, with which several thousand researchers from all over the world work. A significant contribution to the popularity of the collider was made by the so-called "God particle" or the Higgs boson, which was successfully advertised, and for which Peter Higgs received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.
First of all, it should be noted that the Large Hadron Collider was not built from scratch, but arose on the site of its predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (Large Electron-Positron collider or LEP). Work on the 27-kilometer tunnel began in 1983, where it was planned to place an accelerator in the future, which would carry out a collision between an electron and positrons. In 1988, the ring tunnel closed, while the workers approached the tunnel so carefully that the difference between the two ends of the tunnel was only 1 centimeter.
The accelerator operated until the end of 2000, when it reached its peak energy of 209 GeV. After that, its dismantling began. Over the eleven years of its work, LEP has brought a number of discoveries to physics, including the discovery of W and Z bosons and their further research. Based on the results of these studies, a conclusion was made about the similarity of the mechanisms of electromagnetic and weak interactions, as a result of which theoretical work began on combining these interactions into the electroweak one.
In 2001, the construction of the Large Hadron Collider began on the site of the electron-positron accelerator. The construction of the new accelerator was completed at the end of 2007. It was located on the site of LEP - on the border between France and Switzerland, in the valley of Lake Geneva (15 km from Geneva), at a depth of one hundred meters. In August 2008, tests of the collider began, and on September 10, the official launch of the LHC took place. As in the case of the previous accelerator, the construction and operation of the facility is led by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - CERN.
CERN
Briefly, it is worth mentioning the organization CERN (Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire). This organization acts as the world's largest laboratory in the field of high energy physics. It includes three thousand permanent employees, and several thousand more researchers and scientists from 80 countries take part in CERN projects.
At the moment, the project participants are 22 countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain - founders, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania - joined. However, as mentioned above, several dozen more countries somehow take part in the work of the organization, and in particular at the Large Hadron Collider.
How does the Large Hadron Collider work?
What is the Large Hadron Collider and how it works are the main questions of interest to the public. Let's consider these questions further.
Collider (collider) - translated from English means "the one who pushes." The task of such an installation is the collision of particles. In the case of the hadron collider, the role of particles is played by hadrons - particles participating in the strong interaction. These are protons.
Obtaining protons
The long path of protons originates in the duoplasmatron - the first stage of the accelerator, where hydrogen enters in the form of gas. The duoplasmatron is a discharge chamber where an electrical discharge is conducted through the gas. So hydrogen, consisting of only one electron and one proton, loses its electron. Thus, plasma is formed - a substance consisting of charged particles - protons. Of course, it is difficult to obtain a pure proton plasma, therefore, the further formed plasma, which also includes a cloud of molecular ions and electrons, is filtered to separate the proton cloud. Under the action of magnets, the proton plasma is bundled into a beam.
Preacceleration of particles
The newly formed proton beam begins its journey in the LINAC 2 linear accelerator, which is a 30-meter ring, successively hung with several hollow cylindrical electrodes (conductors). The electrostatic field created inside the accelerator is graduated in such a way that the particles between the hollow cylinders always experience an accelerating force towards the next electrode. Without delving entirely into the mechanism of proton acceleration at this stage, we only note that at the exit from LINAC 2, physicists receive a beam of protons with an energy of 50 MeV, which already reach 31% of the speed of light. It is noteworthy that in this case the mass of particles increases by 5%.
By 2019-2020, it is planned to replace LINAC 2 with LINAC 4, which will accelerate protons up to 160 MeV.
It is worth noting that lead ions are also accelerated at the collider, which will make it possible to study quark-gluon plasma. They are accelerated in the LINAC 3 ring, similar to LINAC 2. In the future, experiments with argon and xenon are also planned.
Next, the proton packets enter the proton-synchronous booster (PSB). It consists of four superimposed rings with a diameter of 50 meters, in which electromagnetic resonators are located. The electromagnetic field they create has a high intensity, and a particle passing through it is accelerated as a result of the field potential difference. So after only 1.2 seconds, the particles accelerate in the PSB to 91% of the speed of light and reach an energy of 1.4 GeV, after which they enter the proton synchrotron (PS). The PS is 628 meters in diameter and equipped with 27 magnets to guide the particle beam in a circular orbit. Here the particle protons reach 26 GeV.
The penultimate ring for accelerating protons is the Superproton Synchrotron (SPS), the circumference of which reaches 7 kilometers. Equipped with 1317 magnets, the SPS accelerates particles to an energy of 450 GeV. After about 20 minutes, the proton beam enters the main ring - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Acceleration and collision of particles in the LHC
Transitions between the rings of accelerators occur through electromagnetic fields created by powerful magnets. The main collider ring consists of two parallel lines in which the particles move along the ring orbit in the opposite direction. About 10,000 magnets are responsible for maintaining the circular trajectory of the particles and directing them to the collision points, some of them weighing up to 27 tons. To avoid overheating of the magnets, a helium-4 circuit is used, through which approximately 96 tons of substance flows at a temperature of -271.25 ° C (1.9 K). Protons reach an energy of 6.5 TeV (that is, a collision energy of 13 TeV), while their speed is 11 km / h less than the speed of light. Thus, a beam of protons passes through the large ring of the collider 11,000 times per second. Before the particles collide, they will circulate around the ring for 5 to 24 hours.
The collision of particles occurs at four points in the main ring of the LHC, where four detectors are located: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.
Detectors of the Large Hadron Collider
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
is one of two general purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He explores a wide range of physics, from the search for the Higgs boson to the particles that could make up dark matter. Although it has the same scientific goals as the CMS experiment, ATLAS uses different technical solutions and a different magnetic system design.
Particle beams from the LHC collide at the center of the ATLAS detector, creating oncoming debris in the form of new particles that fly out of the collision point in all directions. Six different detection subsystems, arranged in layers around the point of impact, record the paths, momentum and energy of the particles, allowing them to be individually identified. A huge system of magnets bends the paths of charged particles so that their momentum can be measured.
The interactions in the ATLAS detector create a huge amount of data. To process this data, ATLAS uses an advanced "trigger" system to tell the detector which events to record and which to ignore. Then complex data acquisition and calculation systems are used to analyze the recorded collision events.
The detector has a height of 46 meters and a width of 25 meters, while its weight is 7,000 tons. These parameters make ATLAS the largest particle detector ever built. It is located in a tunnel at a depth of 100 m near the main CERN facility, near the village of Meyrin in Switzerland. The installation consists of 4 main components:
- The inner detector is cylindrical, the inner ring is only a few centimeters from the axis of the passing particle beam, and the outer ring is 2.1 meters in diameter and 6.2 meters long. It consists of three different sensor systems immersed in a magnetic field. An internal detector measures the direction, momentum, and charge of the electrically charged particles produced in each proton-proton collision. The main elements of the internal detector are a pixel detector (Pixel Detector), a semiconductor tracking system (Semi-Conductor Tracker, SCT) and a transition radiation tracker (TRT).
- Calorimeters measure the energy a particle loses as it passes through a detector. It absorbs the particles that appear during the collision, thereby fixing their energy. Calorimeters consist of layers of a high-density "absorbing" material - lead, alternating with layers of an "active medium" - liquid argon. Electromagnetic calorimeters measure the energy of electrons and photons when they interact with matter. Hadron calorimeters measure the energy of hadrons during interaction with atomic nuclei. Calorimeters can stop most known particles, except for muons and neutrinos.
LAr (Liquid Argon Calorimeter) - ATLAS calorimeter
- Muon spectrometer - consists of 4000 individual muon chambers using four different technologies to identify muons and measure their momentum. Muons usually pass through an internal detector and calorimeter, and therefore a muon spectrometer is required.
- The ATLAS magnetic system bends particles around different layers of detector systems, making it easier to follow particle tracks.
The ATLAS experiment (February 2012) employs more than 3,000 scientists from 174 institutions in 38 countries.
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid)
is a general purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Like ATLAS, it has a broad physics program, from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson) to searching for particles that could make up dark matter. Although it has the same scientific goals as the ATLAS experiment, CMS uses different technical solutions and a different magnetic system design.
The CMS detector is built around a huge solenoid magnet. It is a cylindrical coil of superconducting cable that generates a 4 Tesla field, approximately 100,000 times the Earth's magnetic field. The field is bounded by a steel "yoke", which is the most massive component of the detector, the mass of which is 14,000 tons. The complete detector is 21 m long, 15 m wide and 15 m high. The setup consists of 4 main components:
- The solenoid magnet is the largest magnet in the world, which serves to bend the trajectory of charged particles emitted from the point of impact. Trajectory distortion makes it possible to distinguish between positively and negatively charged particles (because they bend in opposite directions), as well as to measure the momentum, the magnitude of which depends on the curvature of the trajectory. The huge size of the solenoid allows you to place the tracker and calorimeters inside the coil.
- Silicon tracker - consists of 75 million individual electronic sensors arranged in concentric layers. When a charged particle flies through the layers of the tracker, it transfers some of the energy to each layer, combining these particle collision points with different layers allows you to further determine its trajectory.
- Calorimeters - electronic and hadronic, see ATLAS calorimeters.
- Sub-detectors - allow you to detect muons. Represented by 1,400 muon chambers, which are arranged in layers outside the coil, alternating with metal plates of the “hamut”.
The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific studies in history, with 4300 participants: particle physicists, engineers and technicians, students and support staff from 182 institutes, 42 countries (February 2014).
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)
- is a heavy ion detector on the rings of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma is formed.
All ordinary matter in the universe today is made up of atoms. Each atom contains a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons (except hydrogen, which has no neutrons), surrounded by a cloud of electrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are made up of quarks bound together with other particles called gluons. No quark has ever been observed in isolation: quarks, as well as gluons, appear to be permanently bound together and confined within compound particles such as protons and neutrons. This is called confinement.
Collisions in the LHC create temperatures over 100,000 times hotter than at the center of the Sun. The collider provides collisions between lead ions, recreating conditions similar to those that took place immediately after the Big Bang. Under these extreme conditions, protons and neutrons "melt", freeing quarks from their bonds with gluons. This is the quark-gluon plasma.
The ALICE experiment uses a 10,000 tonne ALICE detector, 26m long, 16m high and 16m wide. The device consists of three main sets of components: tracking devices, calorimeters and particle identifier detectors. It is also divided into 18 modules. The detector is located in a tunnel at a depth of 56 m below, near the village of Saint-Denis-Pouilly in France.
The experiment has more than 1,000 scientists from more than 100 physics institutes in 30 countries.
LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment)
The experiment explores the small differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called a "beauty quark" or "b-quark".
Instead of surrounding the entire point of impact with a closed detector like ATLAS and CMS, the LHCb experiment uses a series of sub-detectors to detect predominantly forward particles—those that were directed forward as a result of the collision in one direction. The first sub-detector is installed close to the collision point, and the rest are one after the other at a distance of 20 meters.
A great abundance of different types of quarks is created at the LHC before they rapidly decay into other forms. In order to capture b-quarks, complex moving tracking detectors were developed for the LHCb, located close to the motion of the particle beam through the collider.
The 5600-ton LHCb detector consists of a direct spectrometer and flat detectors. It is 21 meters long, 10 meters high and 13 meters wide and is located 100 meters underground. About 700 scientists from 66 different institutes and universities are involved in the LHCb experiment (October 2013).
Other experiments at the collider
In addition to the above experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, there are two other experiments with setups:
- LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward)- studies the particles thrown forward after the collision of particle beams. They imitate cosmic rays, which scientists are studying as part of the experiment. Cosmic rays are naturally charged particles from outer space that constantly bombard the earth's atmosphere. They collide with cores in the upper atmosphere, causing a cascade of particles that reach ground level. Studying how collisions inside the LHC produce such particle cascades will help physicists interpret and calibrate large-scale cosmic ray experiments that can span thousands of kilometers.
The LHCf consists of two detectors that are located along the LHC, 140 meters apart on either side of the ATLAS collision point. Each of the two detectors weighs only 40 kilograms and measures 30 cm long, 80 cm high and 10 cm wide. The LHCf experiment involves 30 scientists from 9 institutions in 5 countries (November 2012).
- TOTEM (Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation)- experiment with the longest installation on the collider. Its mission is to study the protons themselves, by accurately measuring the protons produced by small-angle collisions. This region is known as the "forward" direction and is not available to other LHC experiments. TOTEM detectors extend almost half a kilometer around the CMS interaction point. TOTEM has almost 3,000 kg of equipment, including four nuclear telescopes, as well as 26 Roman pot detectors. The latter type allows the detectors to be placed as close as possible to the particle beam. The TOTEM experiment includes about 100 scientists from 16 institutes in 8 countries (August 2014).
Why is the Large Hadron Collider needed?
The largest international scientific installation explores a wide range of physical problems:
- The study of top quarks. This particle is not only the heaviest quark, but also the heaviest elementary particle. Studying the properties of the top quark also makes sense because it is a research tool.
- Search and study of the Higgs boson. Although CERN claims that the Higgs boson has already been discovered (in 2012), so far very little is known about its nature and further research could bring more clarity to the mechanism of its work.
- Study of quark-gluon plasma. When lead nuclei collide at high speeds, it is formed in the collider. Its study can bring results useful both for nuclear physics (improving the theory of strong interactions) and for astrophysics (the study of the Universe in its first moments of existence).
- Search for supersymmetry. This research aims to refute or prove "supersymmetry" - the theory that any elementary particle has a heavier partner, called a "superparticle".
- Study of photon-photon and photon-hadron collisions. It will improve the understanding of the mechanisms of the processes of such collisions.
- Testing exotic theories. This category of tasks includes the most unconventional - "exotic", for example, the search for parallel universes by creating mini-black holes.
In addition to these tasks, there are many others, the solution of which will also allow humanity to understand nature and the world around us at a better level, which in turn will open up opportunities for creating new technologies.
Practical benefits of the Large Hadron Collider and fundamental science
First of all, it should be noted that fundamental research contributes to fundamental science. Applied science is engaged in the application of this knowledge. A segment of society that is not aware of the benefits of fundamental science often does not perceive the discovery of the Higgs boson or the creation of a quark-gluon plasma as something significant. The connection of such studies with the life of an ordinary person is not obvious. Consider a brief example from nuclear power:
In 1896, the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity. For a long time it was believed that mankind would not soon switch to its industrial use. Just five years before the launch of the first nuclear reactor in history, the great physicist Ernest Rutherford, who actually discovered the atomic nucleus in 1911, said that atomic energy would never find its application. Experts managed to rethink their attitude to the energy contained in the nucleus of an atom in 1939, when German scientists Lisa Meitner and Otto Hahn discovered that uranium nuclei, when irradiated with neutrons, are divided into two parts with the release of a huge amount of energy - nuclear energy.
And only after this last link in a series of fundamental research, applied science came into play, which, on the basis of these discoveries, invented a device for generating nuclear energy - an atomic reactor. The scale of the discovery can be estimated by looking at the share of electricity generation by nuclear reactors. So in Ukraine, for example, 56% of electricity generation falls on nuclear power plants, and in France - 76%.
All new technologies are based on certain fundamental knowledge. Here are a couple more short examples:
- In 1895, Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen noticed that under the influence of X-rays, a photographic plate darkens. Today, radiography is one of the most used studies in medicine, which allows you to study the condition of internal organs and detect infections and swelling.
- In 1915, Albert Einstein proposed his own. Today, this theory is taken into account in the operation of GPS satellites, which determine the location of an object with an accuracy of a couple of meters. GPS is used in cellular communications, cartography, transport monitoring, but primarily in navigation. The error of a satellite that does not take into account general relativity would increase by 10 kilometers per day from the moment of launch! And if a pedestrian can use his mind and a paper map, then the pilots of an airliner will get into a difficult situation, since it is impossible to navigate by clouds.
If today the practical application of the discoveries that have taken place at the LHC has not yet been found, this does not mean that scientists "are messing around with the collider in vain." As you know, a reasonable person always intends to get the maximum practical application of the available knowledge, and therefore the knowledge about nature, accumulated in the process of research at the LHC, will definitely find its application, sooner or later. As has already been demonstrated above, the connection between fundamental discoveries and technologies using them can sometimes be not at all obvious.
Finally, we note the so-called indirect discoveries, which are not set as the original goals of the study. They are quite common, since fundamental discoveries usually require the introduction and use of new technologies. So the development of optics received an impetus from the fundamental research of space, based on the observations of astronomers through a telescope. In the case of CERN, a ubiquitous technology emerged - the Internet, a project proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to facilitate the retrieval of CERN data.
