CERN
The world's growing need for energy, the limits of our supply of fossil fuels and concern about the effects of carbon emissions on the environment have all prompted interest in the increased use of nuclear power. Yet the very word "nuclear" carries with it an association of fear. People are concerned about the waste produced by reactors, the possibility of catastrophic accidents as highlighted by recent events in Japan and the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Yet what if there existed a means of nuclear power generation with which these risks were drastically reduced? Read More
Physicists from the ALICE detector team have been colliding lead nuclei together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in an attempt to recreate the conditions in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Early results have shown that the quark-gluon plasma created at these energies does not form a gas as predicted, but instead suggest that the very early universe behaved like a hot liquid. Read More
Antimatter trapped and studied for first time
An international collaboration of 15 research institutions have produced and trapped antimatter atoms for the first time ever. The feat was part of the ALPHA experiment, which is being conducted at Switzerland’s CERN particle physics laboratory. It could be a step towards answering one the biggest cosmological questions of all time. Read More
Do you know your quarks from your leptons? Need to brush up on wave-particle duality? CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has announced that it will open a permanent “Universe of Particles” exhibition on the ground floor of its incredible conference center - the Globe of Science and Innovation. The exhibition is designed to provide visitors with a fascinating insight into the world of particles and will feature a display on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest accelerator – or as CERN describes it, “one of the most sophisticated scientific tools ever built to explore new territories of knowledge.” Read More
After months of testing, the Large Hadron Collider research program has started at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory on the Franco–Swiss border. Accelerating particles and colliding them at 7 trillion electron volts - just half of its full capacity, but already three and a half times the energy previously achieved by the most powerful particle accelerator in the United States - scientists at LHC are now hoping to answer fundamental questions on the nature of our universe. Read More
Contrary to claims by some scientists that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was being sabotaged from the future to save the world, it is back up and running. The LHC is now beyond the point where it was in 2008 when it had to be shut down just nine days after it had commenced sending beams around its 27km (17 mile) circuit on September 10 last year. Read More
The date 10 September 2008 was forseen by some as the end of the world, at least if you believed scientists who were trying to pull the plug on an experiment that some dubbed the ‘Doomsday Test’. As it turned out a faulty electrical connection brought proceedings to a halt. Now the $9 billion ‘atom-smasher’, aka the Large Hadron Collider, which was developed by CERN to recreate the chemical reactions that took place when the universe came into existence around 14 billion years ago, is gearing up for a restart. Read More
March 20, 2008 Next week (April 6, 2008), one of the most famous research institutions in history CERN will open its doors to the public, offering a unique chance to visit. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (commonly known as CERN) is situated in Geneva and will display its newest and largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), before it goes into operation later this year. This scientific instrument, the largest and most complex in the world, is installed in a 27km tunnel, 100 metres underground. Read More
April 11, 2007 The first sector of CERN ’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be cooled down has reached a temperature of 1.9 K (-271°C) - colder than deep outer space! Although just one-eighth of the LHC ring, this sector is the world’s largest superconducting installation. The entire 27-kilometre LHC ring needs to be cooled down to this temperature in order for the superconducting magnets that guide and focus the proton beams to remain in a superconductive state. Such a state allows the current to flow without resistance, creating a dense, powerful magnetic field in relatively small magnets. Guiding the two proton beams as they travel at nearly the speed of light, curving around the accelerator ring and focusing them at the collision points is no easy task. A total of 1650 main magnets need to be operated in a superconductive state, which presents a huge technical challenge. Read More
