Interesting Facts About the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most powerful collider (particle accelerator) in the world, as well as the most complex experimental facility ever constructed. Built by European Organization for Nuclear Research — also known as CERN — the LHC first went live up on September 10, 2008. It is still CERN’s latest inclusion to its accelerator complex.

Here in this gallery we explore more interesting facts about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

How many people are involved with LHC? Well, about ten thousand engineers and scientists coming from 60 countries across the globe.

The LHC is home to 9300 powerful superconducting magnets. They are set to extremely low temperatures — in fact, even more freezing than the deep space — thanks to 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen. Then they are brought down to -271.3 degrees Celsius in liquid helium.

LHC has conducted a couple of studies. One is called supersymmetry, the concept that there are more particles that exist beyond the number of particles found on the Standard Model. Another is the enigma surrounding the anti-matter, particularly on why the anti-matter is quite rare compared to matter. Supersymmetry could provide the answers as to why visible matter takes up only 4% of the universe, while dark matter and dark energy account for a combined 96% of it.

It consists of an extremely vast vacuum — so empty that it is likened to a interplanetary space. This is designed in order to prevent protons from colliding with gas molecules.

It’s not surprising then that LHC has built a supercomputer that is the most powerful in the world. The name is “The Grid” which is built from several thousands of computers from many parts of the planet. If the LHC is going to release a recorded data of each of their big researches and experiments, it would have released around 100,000 dual-layer DVDs per year.

The LHC beams hydrogen protons and ions in opposite directions, traveling at a astounding 99.9999991% of the speed of light. This speed is equivalent to 11,245 laps every second or 671,000,000 miles per hour.

The LHC is a vast network of underground tunnels on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It consists of four huge labs interspersed around a circular tunnel which measures 27 kilometers (or 17 miles) in circumference, with a depth of 175 meters (or 574 feet).

The LHC has collisions which occur every second. They emit temperatures that reach over 100,000 times much hotter than the Sun’s.

The LHC was completed in 2008. It cost about 6.03 Swiss francs — or in today’s money, that’s 5 billion euros, 6.2 billion British pound, or US$6.27 billion.