This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is constantly being repaired, it will only be retired after 22 years.
Ten years have passed since the start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of the most complex machines ever created by mankind. The LHC is the world's largest particle accelerator, buried 100 meters under the Swiss-French border and located within a 27-kilometer radius.
By the 10th anniversary of the Large Hadron Collider, KP recalls the most important dates in its work and thinks about what will happen to it next.
Successful launch and first problems
On September 10, 2008, thanks to the efforts of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the first proton beam successfully sailed around a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets. The LHC is officially up and running.
During this period, this was a landmark achievement for thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians. They spent decades planning and building a colossal underground machine that would help answer questions about the universe and its origins, recreating conditions after the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago.
However, the more than $ 10 billion machine almost immediately began to malfunction. On September 22, 2008, an incident occurred that damaged 50 of the LHC's more than 6,000 magnets - critical to keeping the protons moving along its circular path. The repair took over a year, and in March 2010 the collider started working correctly again. The cost of troubleshooting was over $ 40 million.
Promotional video:
In a giant underground collider, high-energy protons traveling at the speed of light in two counter-rotating beams collide with each other.
Protons keep colliding
In a giant underground collider, high-energy protons traveling at the speed of light in two counter-rotating beams collide with each other. The wreckage is then tracked on huge detectors and scientists study the results.
CERN says the particles are so small that their collision is like a parallel shot from two needles that are 10 kilometers apart, which meet halfway.
Breakthrough years
After the launch of the collider in 2010, a time of discovery and success began. The LHC ran smoothly, power slowly increased, as did the speed of particle collisions, giving scientists the ability to search for exotic particles with valuable data.
2012 was a breakthrough year for CERN. On July 4, scientists announced that they had recorded a huge amount of evidence for the discovery of a new particle - the elusive Higgs boson, the pivot of the Standard Model of particle physics as part of the Big Bang study, which is believed to give mass to other objects and creatures in the universe.
The discovery of the Higgs boson was the culmination of decades of intellectual effort by many people around the world. Two scientists - Peter Higgs from Great Britain and François Engler from Belgium - received the Nobel Prize in Physics. But this is not the end of the story, and researchers must study the Higgs boson in detail to measure its properties.
A future with a new collider?
To address new physics issues and to obtain a clearer picture of the subatomic world and new phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy, the LHC has been constantly modernizing, constantly increasing the energy and the number of collisions.
In 2018, six years after he confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, the car went into overhaul. The beams of protons that collided with each other were focused to increase the number of particle collisions tenfold, giving a better chance of detecting something unusual. CERN said that after the upgrade, the LHC will produce 15 million Higgs bosons per year, and not the three million registered in 2017.
It is planned that the LHC will operate until 2040. But CERN is already thinking about his successor. Scientists are developing designs for a more high-performance machine known as the Circular Collider (FCC) to expand the research currently being done with the LHC.
The radius of the circular collider can range from 80 to 100 kilometers, which will greatly increase the intensity of particle movement at temperatures up to 100 teraelectron volts (TeV). The LHC is currently operating at a temperature of 14 TeV. But it is still irreplaceable for the future of physics.
GRIGORY PUSHKAREV
