There are actually about 30,000 other accelerators humming around the world, and it's those working Joes that are to thank for all sorts of practical inventions. Discovery of the Higgs allowed physicists to more confidently confirm the existence of the Higgs field, which gave us some answers about how matter in the universe acquired mass.īut if the LHC is the Beyoncé of the accelerator world, there are quite a few studio players happily plugging away as well. (Trust us - the acronym made sense for the original French title.) The LHC became the Big Accelerator On Campus in 2012, when particle collisions at CERN revealed evidence of the elusive Higgs boson. Located in Switzerland, the LHC is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The most well-known particle accelerator is probably the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular behemoth deep underground. What are accelerators, and why can't we toss in something a little more substantial than a particle, anyway? Turns out that grabbing a particle for high-speed collisions isn't as easy as just cupping your hands and blowing some subatomic particles into the Large Hadron Collider like so many invisible snowflakes.īefore we get into what we're actually putting into a particle accelerator, perhaps it's wise to give a little background on just what the heck we intend to do with our particles once we have them. Unlike their cousins-in-science the biologists (who can browse all orders of rodents, roundworms and the like on websites for easy bulk shopping), physicists have to create their test subjects themselves.
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