The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator being built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It was first started up on 10 September 2008 and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC weighs more than 38000 tonnes but runs 27km in a circular tunnel 100 meters beneath the ground.
The 27-kilometer ring consists of superconducting magnets with several accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes, two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without any resistance or loss of energy. This requires cooling the magnets to ‑271.3°C, a temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, most of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system containing liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as other supply services. Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. These include 1232 dipole magnets, 15 meters in length which bend the beams, and 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 meters long, which focus the beams.
Just before the collision, another type of magnet is used to "squeeze" the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is like firing two needles from 10 kilometers apart with such precision that they meet halfway through.
All the controls for the accelerator, its services, and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From there, the beams inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of four particle detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb.
The term "hadron" refers to subatomic composite particles composed of quarks held together by the strong force. A collider is a particle accelerator of two directed beams. In particle physics, colliders are used as a research tool. Analysis of the byproducts of these collisions gives scientists good evidence of the structure of the subatomic world and the laws of nature governing it. Many of these byproducts are produced only by high-energy collisions, and they decay after very short periods. Thus, many of them are hard or nearly impossible to study in other ways.
The Large Hadron Collider is meant to analyze what exactly happened after the Big Bang that allowed all matter to survive and make things the way they are today by reproducing the conditions after the Big Bang within a billionth of a second after colliding beams of high-energy particles close to the speed of light. Cut here!!!
Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe began with a bang. Crammed within an infinitely small space, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter. But as the Universe cooled and expanded, its composition changed. Just one second after the Big Bang, antimatter had all but disappeared, leaving the matter to form everything that we see around us from the stars and galaxies to the Earth and all life that it supports. Scientists will be able to learn about new and completely different types of particles that existed for barely a second before they disintegrated the moment the Big Bang took place. To understand the origin of the universe, we must understand the concept of particles first.
I believe that the LHC experiment could open up opportunities to learn more about time travel. We would be able to go to our past or future. However, this is where things get interesting. Does changing things in our past or future create an alternate timeline? What if it creates an alternate reality where things go side by side to the reality we live in, but that one thing we change in the timeline has a huge impact? Supposedly someone went back in time and stopped an apple from falling on Isaac Newton's head, would it change our whole understanding of physics and gravity as it is? Or would someone else make the discoveries that Newton made? Or would we never know about gravity? What would happen if we met ourselves in the past or future? What if we brought a dead person who was alive in the past to our present reality?
I also believe that the experiment may also help us discover or open up a portal into another dimension or realm of the universe or possibly even answer our questions about the existence of the Almighty "God," our universal life force.
However, I have another long-shot theory that possibly explains previously seen UFO sightings. I believe that maybe aliens from another dimension, alternate reality or another part of the universe carried out a similar experiment like the LHC and succeeded which led to them being able to access our universe or world through a portal. Therefore, they might have accessed the portal to come to our planet, however, we haven't located the portal yet.
The Large Hadron Collider first went online on 10th September 2008, but initial testing was delayed by 14 months following a magnet quench incident that caused extensive damage to over 50 superconducting magnets, their mountings, and the vacuum pipes. During its first run (2010–2013), the LHC collided two opposing particle beams of either proton at up to 4 teraelectronvolts, or lead nuclei. Its first run discoveries included the long-sought Higgs boson, several hadrons like the χb (3P) bottomonium state, the first creation of a quark-gluon plasma, and the first observations of the very rare decay of the Bs meson into two muons (Bs0 → μ+μ−), which challenged the validity of existing models of supersymmetry.
However, a few weeks later, physicists found a bump on a diagram similar to that representing the Higgs Boson but it was a completely different particle. Physicists wrote about 500 papers upon this bump and claimed it could be the discovery of a new particle. The world of particle physics had been turned upside down. This was because the bump on the diagram indicated an unexpectedly large number of collisions whose debris consisted of only 2 photons which is very rare. Scientists built a Standard Model which describes all forces of nature at a smaller scale. However, gravity is missing from this model. It is supposedly the weakest force. We can briefly beat gravity by jumping, but can we pull an atom out of our body? This proposes a wild theory by scientists that maybe gravity is just as strong as other forces.
What if, the rest of gravity lurks in an extra-spatial dimension invisible to us? Therefore, to test this theory, scientists will again collide 2 photons in the LHC momentarily leading to the existence of a hypothetical, extra-spatial graviton. This could be a possible explanation for the unnatural bump in the diagram. However, years later it was a disappointment when it was found out that the unnatural bump in the diagram was just an anomaly. But scientists didn't give up, they decided maybe if they were to build a bigger particle accelerator sometime in the future, and experiment at higher energies, they could have an answer to this anomalous bump.
However, there can be some issues with this experiment. The LHC, like other particle accelerators, recreates the natural phenomena of cosmic rays under controlled laboratory conditions, enabling them to be studied in more detail. Cosmic rays are particles produced in outer space, some of which are accelerated to energies far exceeding those of the LHC. The energy and the rate at which they reach the Earth’s atmosphere have been measured in experiments for some 70 years. Over the past billions of years, Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists. Astronomers observe an enormous number of larger astronomical bodies throughout the Universe, all of which are also struck by cosmic rays. The Universe as a whole conducts more than 10 million million LHC-like experiments per second. The possibility of any dangerous consequences can therefore be ruled out.
Blackholes are often created in the universe upon the end of a star's life. Similarly, speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons. However, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, based on the properties of gravity, microscopic black holes cannot be created by the LHC. Therefore, some speculative theories predict the production of such particles at the LHC. All these theories predict that these particles would disintegrate immediately. So, black holes would have no time to start accreting matter and to cause macroscopic effects.
Whilst collisions at the LHC differ from cosmic-ray collisions with astronomical bodies like the Earth in that new particles produced in LHC collisions tend to move more slowly than those produced by cosmic rays, one can still demonstrate their safety. The specific reasons for this depend on whether the black holes are electrically charged, or neutral. Many stable black holes would be expected to be electrically charged since they are created by charged particles. In this case, they would interact with ordinary matter and be stopped while traversing the Earth or Sun, whether produced by cosmic rays or the LHC. The fact that the Earth and Sun are still here rules out the possibility that cosmic rays or the LHC could produce dangerous charged microscopic black holes. If stable microscopic black holes had no electric charge, their interactions with the Earth would be very weak. Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth. However, there are much larger and denser astronomical bodies than the Earth in the Universe. Black holes produced in cosmic-ray collisions with bodies such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars would be brought to rest. The continued existence of such dense bodies, as well as the Earth, rules out the possibility of the LHC producing any dangerous black holes.
Strangelet is the term given to a hypothetical microscopic lump of ‘strange matter’ containing almost equal numbers of particles called up, down, and strange quarks. According to most theoretical work, strangelets should change to ordinary matter within a thousand-millionth of a second. However, it is very unlikely for a strangelet to form in such cases. It is difficult for strange matter to stick together in the high temperatures produced by such colliders.
There have been speculations that the Universe is not in its most stable configuration and that perturbations caused by the LHC could tip it into a more stable state, called a vacuum bubble, in which we could not exist. If the LHC could do this, then so could cosmic-ray collisions. Since such vacuum bubbles have not been produced anywhere in the visible Universe, they will not be made by the LHC.
Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles with a single magnetic charge, either a north pole or a south pole. Some speculative theories suggest that, if they do exist, magnetic monopoles could cause protons to decay. These theories also say that such monopoles would be too heavy to be produced at the LHC. Nevertheless, if the magnetic monopoles were light enough to appear at the LHC, cosmic rays striking the Earth’s atmosphere would already be making them, and the Earth would very effectively stop and trap them. The continued existence of the Earth and other astronomical bodies, therefore, rules out dangerous proton-eating magnetic monopoles light enough to be produced at the LHC.
This LHC project could truly change our understanding of the universe and bring about new scope into Physics itself. Many scientists believe that this experiment will help answer some of the fundamental unanswered questions of Physics and uncover some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. We would be able to discover so much more about the space-time continuum. It will also allow physicists to test different theories of particle and quantum physics and measuring the properties of the Higgs Boson.
However, it could also be possible that none of the scientists' predictions or theories come true which would mean that we never truly understood science and our universe. Reality could be completely different from how we perceive it which would be very fascinating.
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