Dawn of the Large Hadron Collider
Credit & Copyright: Maximilien Brice,
CERN Explanation: Why do objects have mass? To help find out,
Europe's
CERN has built the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful
particle accelerator yet created by
humans. This May, the
LHC is scheduled to start smashing protons into each other with unprecedented impact speeds. The
LHC will explore the leading explanation that mass arises from ordinary particles slogging through an otherwise invisible but pervasive
field of
virtual Higgs particles. Were high energy colliding particles to create real
Higgs bosons, the
Higgs mechanism for mass creation may be bolstered. LHC will also look for
micro black holes,
magnetic monopoles, and explore the possibility that every type of
fundamental particle we know about has a nearly invisible
supersymmetric counterpart. The
LHC@Home project will allow anyone with a home computer to help
LHC scientists search archived LHC data for these strange beasts.
Pictured above, a person stands in front of the huge
ATLAS detector, one of six detectors being attached to the
LHC.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...s_cern_big.jpg