Big Bang Experiment

A new era began for the scientific community on Tuesday 30 March`10 as the much delayed 'Big Bang' experiment kicked off successfully after a delay of 18-months. The protons have been successfully collided inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva and the experiment has been declared successful.The collider, which occupies a 17-mile (27km) circular tunnel 100m beneath the French-Swiss border, accelerated two counter-rotating beams of protons to an unprecedented energy of 3.5tn electron volts (TeV).The experiment was first initiated on Sep 10, 2008. Just nine days later on Sep 19, 2008 the experiment hit a massive road block as freezing helium gas leaked out. This led to the experiment being delayed for over a year.

Satyaki Bhattacharya, a Delhi university professor who has been involved with the experiment, said in New Delhi, that the scientists were on a hunt to detect the elusive Higgs boson which is considered as a missing link in the Standard Model of particle physics.

Some Facts About Large Hadron Collider

● Although built to study the smallest known building blocks of all things – particles – the Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It contains 9,300 magnets and has a circumference of 27km (17 miles)

● At full power, trillions of protons race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second, travelling at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light. It is capable of engineering 600m collisions every second


● To avoid colliding with gas molecules inside the accelerator, the beams of particles travel in an ultra-high vacuum – a cavity as empty as interplanetary space

● The cooling system circulates super-fluid helium around the LHC’s accelerator ring and keeps the machine at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius

● When two beams of protons collide, they generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space

● To collect data of up to 600m proton collisions per second, physicists and scientists have built electronic trigger systems to measure the passage time of a particle to a few billionths of a second

● The data recorded by the LHC’s big experiments will fill about 100,000 dual-layer DVDs every year. Tens of thousands of computers have been harnessed in a network called The Grid that will hold the information

● Thousands of scientists around the world will collaborate on analysing the data over the next 15 years (the estimated lifetime of the LHC)