The Large Hadron Collider (short LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN. It is currently under construction and scheduled to start operation in 2007. It will become the world's largest particle accelerator by then. It uses the 27km circumference tunnel created for the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider. In contrast to the previous it will collide protons (one type of hadron particle) instead of electrons and positrons. The protons used will have an energy of 7 TeV each (total collision energy of 14 TeV). Five experiments will be built to utilize the LHC. Two of them, ATLAS and CMS are large, "general purpose" particle detectors. The other three (LHCb, ALICE, and TOTEM) are smaller and more specialized.
The LHC can also be used to collide heavy ions such as lead (Pb) (collision energy will be 1150 TeV).
Physicists hope to use the collider to answer the following questions:
What is mass? (We know how to measure it - but what is it?)
What's the origin of mass of particles? (In particular, does the Higgs Boson exist?)
Why do elementary particles have different masses? (I.e., do particles interact with a Higgs field?)
The LHC is being installed in a tunnel 27 km in circumference, buried 50-175 m below ground.
Due to switch on in 2007, the LHC will provide collisions at the highest energies ever observed in laboratory conditions and physicists are eager to see what they will reveal.
If the LHC used ordinary warm magnets instead of superconductors, the ring would have to be at least 120 km in circumference to achieve the same collision energy.
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