Stefan Spanier, associate professor of physics and astronomy, made a presentation about the Large Hadron Collider located in Geneva, Switzerland on March 27.  

The collider, abbreviated LHC, is positioned about 100 meters subsurface on a flat rock bed. It is the world's largest particle accelerator.

Particle accelerators allow beams of high-energy particles (such as protons against protons) to crash into one another. Spanier explained that particles collide with large kinetic energy and what emanates from the crash are other particles (mass can neither be created or destroyed).

Close to 15 million gigabytes of data is collected each year from the LHC and researchers must sort through it all to find the rare signals.

Besides allowing scientists to study rare events and providing an opportunity to better justify the relative weakness of gravity, experimenting with high-energy particle beams also permits scientists to better understand the properties of particle decay.

"We're trying to establish a pattern in all of the decay to find out what is going on," Spanier said.

Another main item of interest is how particles acquire their mass in the first place. The Higgs field model is used to explain this phenomenon, and with the LHC researchers will hopefully be able to track this occurrence and confirm hanging theories.  

"How do you detect this Higgs?" Spanier asked. "If you collide the bunches of protons every 25 nanoseconds, you may produce [it]."

Spanier said the research department here at UT is searching for the Higgs.

The LHC has seven times higher energy than previous models. In fact, proton-proton collisions happen at an energy of 14 tera electron volts. Spanier said this is equivalent to using about 70,000 Hiroshima bombs to accelerate a 22 caliber bullet.

 "The more energy you give electrons, the more energy they lose. The way this new collider is built, it has much lower loss of energy and light. In fact, it runs with the same energy budget as the previous energy accelerator," Spanier also said.

Thirty eight countries, 2310 authors, and 176 laboratories all work with the LHC as part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration.

The last high energy beam was sent on September 9, 2008, according to Spanier. In October 2009 it will once again be run, and continue until enough data are accumulated for the "first benchmark analyses".

One concern with the LHC is that it could form its own black hole. Yes, we sure have come a long way from the beginning of the Universe. Time to go back.