Science Teaching Resources: Hadron Particle Accelerator

September 1st, 2008 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

For more information about the Large Hadron Collider, visit CERN’s Website.

The Big Picture site from The Boston Globe is a collection of photos that you wouldn’t see in a newspaper or magazine, but they’re fascinating and useful for teachers. One of those photo essays is about Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has built a 17-mile particle accelerator, the LHC, to test the origins of, well, everything. CERN ran some preliminary tests in August and has been chilling the tunnels (1.9 degrees above absolute zero) in preparation for the first beam to accelerate around the track on Sept. 10, 2009.
LHC will force two hadron beams, some of the smallest bits in the universe, to collide at high speeds. Scientists expect their experiments to support or disprove the Standard Model of particle physics and the Big Bang Theory.
From a non-scientific perspective, the photos are terrific. Colorful and geometric, the photos show the grand scale of the world’s largest scientific experiment. Since the photos are huge and detailed, expect the page to load very slowly.
The photo tour of the LHC includes:

• The insertion of liquid argon crystal into the ATLAS inner detector end cap
• A look over a worker’s shoulder and into the pixel detector
• The installation of the world’s largest silicon tracking detector
• An aerial view of the French and Swiss landscape in which shows the accelerator’s tunnels

Tags: experiment, science