The Large Hadron Collider : the LHC

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The Large Hadron Collider the LHC
10 September 2008, 9 am attempt to circulate
the first proton beam
Live satellite broadcast and webcast
activity in CERN Control Center interviews
The Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN
link LHC start-up
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The LHC at CERN
The detectors at the LHC
27 km
100 m
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The detectors at LHC
The detectors at LHC
12.000 T
6.000 T
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What for?
discover the smallest constituents of matter and
understand how they interact to build up our
Universe
electrons
quarks
quarks
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Some of the Questions we hope to Answer...

• What is the origin of mass?
• How many space-time dimensions do we live in?
• Are the particles fundamental or do they possess
  structure?
• Why is there overwhelmingly more matter than
  anti-matter in the Universe?
• What is the nature of the dark matter that
  pervades our galaxy?

Claire Timlin - Festival of Science
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14/09/07
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The role of Belgium Since 1993 Belgian
scientists contribute to CMSNow 70 from UA,
UCL, UG, ULB, UMH and VUBWith other countries,
they built the CMS Tracker
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The CMS collaboration
F 15 m L 22 m 12 500 T
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CMS is ready, it is taking data with cosmic
rays for several months
It sees tracks !
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The LHC Grid
The LHC data challenge 15 Million
Gigabytes/year (about 20 million CDs!) Computing
power needed to analyze the data 100,000 of
fastest PC processors ? distributed network of
computing resources
2 Grid centers in Belgium !
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Safety of LHC collisions

• Could we create in LHC collisions some objects,
  such as black holes, that might be dangerous ?
• No!

Nature has already conducted the equivalent of
100,000 LHC experiments on Earth, and the
planet still exists !
Why?