LOCATION Beneath the Franco-Swiss border
NEAREST POPULATION HUB Geneva, Switzerland
SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: the world’s largest particle accelerator, studying the creation of the Universe.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a huge scientific instrument that smashes together subatomic particles called protons at speeds close to the speed of light, in order to replicate conditions that occurred in the trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. However, skeptics are concerned that in searching to understand the origins of the Universe, the experiment could bring about its end.
The LHC is run by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. which authorized funding for the project in 1994. It began operating in 2008, having cost in the region of US$10 billion to build, and consists of a 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring buried 100 meters (330 ft) below ground on the Franco-Swiss border, in an area between the Jura and Alps mountain ranges. The facility makes use of a tunnel previously used for CERN’s Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), an experiment that was dismantled in 2000.
The big idea behind the LHC is to expand our scientific knowledge beyond that laid out in the Standard Model—a framework that for several decades has provided the most widely accepted explanation for how subatomic particles function. For all its strengths, it has long been realized that the Standard Model leaves many fundamental questions unanswered. The LHC looks to fill some of these gaps by crashing together two beams of “hadrons”—consisting of protons or lead ions—by firing them in opposite directions around the accelerator, the hadrons gaining in energy as they increase in speed with every lap. The powerful magnetic field required to propel these energy-rich particles is provided by 1,750 superconducting magnets kept just a couple of degrees above absolute zero by several hundred thousand liters of liquid helium provided by a series of above-ground refrigeration plants.
WEIRD SCIENCE A view of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a giant detector instrument designed to observe an array of particles and phenomena resulting from the LHC’s high-energy collisions. Scientists hope it will provide crucial data to help explain the fundamental structure of the Universe.
After some initial hiccups, the LHC started its experiments in earnest in 2010. At full power, it sends trillions of protons around the accelerator ring at a speed equivalent to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, achieving 600 million collisions every second. The effects of these crashes are captured and recorded by one of four vast detectors located at intervals around the accelerator. Each detector weighs several tons and building and fitting them into the LHC was a remarkable feat of engineering. For instance, just one of the detectors—the Atlas detector, which at 7,000 tons is by no means the largest—took a full two years to locate in a specially excavated cavern as deep as a 12-story building.
With some 10,000 scientists from 40 countries involved in the project and huge attendant media coverage, it may hardly be said that CERN has undertaken its work on the LHC on the quiet. One of the project’s chief aims is to detect the hitherto theoretical Higgs Boson, believed to be responsible for providing the mass to other subatomic particles. In late 2011, the LHC team tentatively suggested that the Higgs Boson may have been glimpsed for the first time, prompting a surge of excitement among the world’s physicists, scientific journalists and interested laymen.
But for some observers, the LHC poses frightening and largely unknowable risks. Almost as soon as the project was first approved, startling Doomsday scenarios were being prophesied. Principal among these was the suggestion that the collider might produce black holes that could swell and ultimately consume the Earth. However, most experts agree that even if a black hole was produced, it would pose no risk as it would be microscopic in scale and would evaporate almost immediately. Another theory warns of the creation of “strangelets,” prompting a runaway fusion process that could turn everything on the planet into “strange matter.” Still others suggest that “vacuum bubbles” will be created, stabilizing aspects of our universe that are inherently unstable and in the process rendering Earth uninhabitable for the human race.
Naturally, the safety of the LHC has been endorsed by numerous independent scientific authorities—and as you read this, the world has presumably not yet come to a premature end. But skeptics continue to argue that any experiment always involves some uncertainty over results—so why carry out an experiment that poses such large potential risks?
SUPER COLLIDER The tunnels and experimental chambers of the Large Hadron Collider are buried at depths of 50 to 175 meters (160 to 574 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Particles are boosted to high speeds by the LINAC and SPS accelerators before they are injected into the LHC itself.