Large Hadron Collider

24/9/2012

UNIVERSITY SAN CARLOS DE GUATEMALA ENGINEERING SCHOOL TECHNICAL ENGLISH I [IT1]

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER LHC

Jorge Herrera ID 9012707
Introduction&objectives2background3largehadroncollisoner4conclusions&timeline&bibliography5

INTRODUCTION
The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. It is located near Geneva at CERN¹ over the border ofSwitzerland and France. It uses part of the structures of the LEP² closed in 2000, a tunnel of 27 kilometers of circumference and about 100m underground. Its creation was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss Francs (about 1.7 billion Euros) and over 2000 physicists from 34 countries and hundreds of universities and labs participated in such construction. Its objective is to revealsome of the fundamental secrets of nature still not discovered. Physicists use the LHC to recreate the conditions after the Big Bang³, by colliding two beams head-on at very high energy. The particles created in that collision are analyzed using special detectors in a number of experiments, and same number of theories. Despite the enormous amount of data that we can discuss, it s not that simple forregular people like us (I mean not being a physicist) know where this information come from and its understanding. So, let s take a short trip to the most expensive experiment ever made by the human kind and learn the basic concepts surrounding its vastness and complexity, and someday-somehow stimulated by curiosity we dig deeper or keep updated with what physicists consider is going to revealsome fundamental secrets not discovered yet.

OBJECTIVES
ü Understanding the theoretical frame that drives the avid hunt of answers. ü To take a brief look to most valuable experiments in its time line. ü Know about future discoveries and safety issues.
¹ Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (for its acronym in French) founded in 1954
Positron Collider ³ Scientific Model that explainsthe origins of the Universe

² Large Electron-

BACKGROUND
The Standard Model Is one of the biggest scientific achievements in the
20th century science. It is called the Standard Model of Particles and Forces in Physics. Developed about 40 years ago in early 1970s, has become as a welltested physics theory due to several experiments and predicted precisely a wide variety of phenomena overtime. Everything around us is made of matter particles, occurring in two basic types: the quarks and the leptons. The Standard Models describes the Universe using 6 quarks and 6 leptons and a few force-carrying particles. They work over different range and have different strengths. Three of the fundamental forces result from the exchange of force carrier particles, and belong to a broader groupcalled bosons. Each fundamental force has its own corresponding boson particle.
The Gravity force The Electromagnetic force The Weak force The Strong force The weakest but has infinitive range, included by tentative hypothesis Also has infinitive range but it is many times stronger than gravity Effective over a very short range and dominate only at subatomic particles level Same as above but is thestrongest among all four fundamental interactions. Carrier: not discovered yet. Carrier: the photon boson Carrier: the W and Z boson Carrier: the gluon boson

The particles that are affected by the strong nuclear force are called hadrons and are formed by quarks, leptons are not affected but they both belong to another basic group of particles: the fermions. The fermions are considered the basicconstituents of matter which interact with each other with the help of bosons. The difference among them is due to their spin. The Standard Model incorporates only three of the four fundamental forces, so the whole picture is not taken yet. Another essential ingredient is missing: a particle named Higgs boson and the graviton, so despite its effectiveness describing the phenomena new experiments...