The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
The LHC is located in a 27-kilometer ring-shaped tunnel beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is operated by CERN.
The LHC’s main purpose is to collide beams of protons head-on at very high energies – up to 14 TeV per beam. These collisions occur in special sections of the accelerator called interaction points or collimators. The resulting debris – predominantly pions – is detected by large general-purpose detectors, such as ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb. These experiments allow physicists to study the structure of matter and search for new particles predicted by theories such as supersymmetry and extra dimensions.
In 2012, the LHC made headlines around the world when it announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson – a fundamental building block of our Universe first theorized over 50 years ago. This discovery culminated decades of effort to find an elementary scalar particle responsible for generating masses for all other known particles in nature through its coupling with them.
In addition to its role in answering some of the most fundamental questions about our Universe, the LHC will continue to play a crucial part in advancing human knowledge more generally. As our understanding of physics evolves, so too will the types of questions we want to ask – making it likely that future discoveries at CERN will be just as momentous as those we have already seen.