Why the large hadron collider is important

The Standard Model of particle physics — a theory developed in the early s that describes the fundamental particles and their interactions — has precisely predicted a wide variety of phenomena and so far successfully explained almost all experimental results in particle physics.. But the Standard Model is incomplete. It leaves many questions open, which the LHC will help to answer. Scientists started thinking about the LHC in the early s, when the previous accelerator, the LEP , was not yet running.

They use detectors to analyse the myriad of particles produced by collisions in the accelerator. These experiments are run by collaborations of scientists from institutes all over the world. Each experiment is distinct, and characterized by its detectors. Over petabytes of data are permanently archived, on tape. The experimental collaborations are individual entities, funded independently from CERN. For Run 2, the estimated power consumption is GWh per year. The total CERN energy consumption is 1.

Higgs update 4 July. See LHC Milestones. The discovery of the Higgs boson was only the first chapter of the LHC story. Indeed, the restart of the machine this year marks the beginning of a new adventure, as it will operate at almost double the energy of its first run. The LHC is planned to run over the next 20 years, with several stops scheduled for upgrades and maintenance work. Resources Faqs Facts and figures about lhc.

Two LHC magnets are seen before they are connected together. The blue cylinders contain the magnetic yoke and coil of the dipole magnets together with the liquid helium system required to cool the magnet so that it becomes superconducting. But before CERN can start building its new machine, it will have to seek new funding beyond the regular budget it receives from member states.

The costly plan has its detractors — even in the physics community. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, has emerged as a critic of pursuing ever-higher energies, when the scientific payback — apart from measuring the properties of known particles — is far from guaranteed.

I just think there is not enough scientific potential in doing that kind of study right now. Correction 23 June : An earlier version of this story misstated the energy at which the Large Hadron Collider can operate. It is 14 teraelectronvolts TeV , not 16 TeV. News 10 NOV News 05 NOV Editorial 03 NOV Article 10 NOV Research Highlight 05 NOV Article 03 NOV News 15 OCT News 10 AUG News 16 JUL These are eye-popping numbers, no doubt. Indeed, particle colliders are currently the most expensive physics experiments in existence.

Their price tag is higher than that of even the next most expensive type of experiments, telescopes on satellite missions. The major reason the cost is so high is that that, since the s, there have only been incremental improvements in collider technology. As a consequence, the only way to reach higher energies today is building bigger machines. It is the sheer physical size—the long tunnels, the many magnets need to fill it, and all the people needed to get that done—that makes particle colliders so expensive.

But while the cost of these colliders has ballooned, their relevance has declined. When physicists started building colliders in the s, they did not have a complete inventory of elementary particles, and they knew it.

New measurements brought up new puzzles, and they built bigger colliders until, in , the picture was complete. The Standard Model still has some loose ends, but experimentally testing those would require energies at least ten billion times higher than what even the FCC could test. The scientific case for a next larger collider is therefore presently slim.

Of course, it is possible that a next larger collider would make a breakthrough discovery. Some physicists hope, for example, it could offer clues about the nature of dark matter or dark energy. Yes, one can hope. And that is assuming they are particles to begin with, for which there no evidence. Even if they are particles, moreover, highly energetic collisions may not be the best way to look for them.

Weakly interacting particles with tiny masses, for example, are not something one looks for with large colliders. And there are entirely different types of experiments that could lead to breakthroughs at far smaller costs, such as high precision measurements at low energies or increasing the masses of objects in quantum states.