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We are in the search of these quarks, protons, and electrons, which all have a low
decay time from their creation, which is where the accelerator solution comes in.
Accelerators
A Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built at CERN with the goal to smash protons moving
at 99.999,999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction
of a second after the big bang. The LHC experiments try and work out what happened in
particle physics experiments. Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the
unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the
biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you
have to focus energy on an awesome scale. Some questions that we hope to answer with
LHC experiments are as follows:
Why do we observe matter and almost no antimatter if we believe there is a
symmetry between the two in the universe?
What is this “dark matter” that we cannot see that has visible gravitational effects
in the cosmos?
Why cannot the Standard Model predict a particle’s mass?
Are quarks and leptons actually fundamental, or made up of even more
fundamental particles?
Why are there exactly three generations of quarks and leptons?
How does gravity fit into all of this?
To get the LHC experiments a set of outcomes including the discovery of the “God
particle”, we established the following frontiers:
The Energy Frontier: using high-energy colliders to discover new particles and
directly probe the architecture of the fundamental forces.
The Intensity Frontier: using intense particle beams to uncover properties of
neutrinos and observe rare processes that will tell us about new physics beyond
the Standard Model.
The Cosmic Frontier: using underground experiments and telescopes, both ground
and space based, to reveal the natures of dark matter and dark energy and using
high-energy particles from space to probe new phenomena.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located in a circular tunnel 27 km (17 miles) in
circumference. The tunnel is buried around 100 m (about the size of a football field)
underground. LHC straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.
The collider consists of distinct sets of components that cover the 27 km boundary. The
goal of the collider is to deliver the smash of the two photons and provide introspections
into the underlying matter and how fast it decays. Prior to the LHC we first built a Large