Large Hadron Collider Era

THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER ERA

Introduction

Fig1: One of the first images from the CMS detector, a key component of the LHC, showing the debris of
particles picked up in the detector’s calorimeters and muon chambers after the beam was steered into the
collimator (tungsten block) at point 5.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle

accelerator. Straddling the border between France and Switzerland at the CERN
laboratory, the LHC is designed to answer some of the most profound questions
about the universe & colon;

What is the origin of mass? Why are we made of matter and not antimatter?
What is dark matter made of?

It could also provide important new clues about conditions in the very early
universe, when the four forces of nature were rolled into one giant super force.

To find out, the LHC will set protons travelling at 99.9999991% of the
speed of light around a circular tunnel. It will then smash them together at four
points on the ring, each of which are surrounded by huge experiments.

The collision energy produced is 14 teraelectronvolts (TeV), seven times

greater than its nearest counterpart – the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 1

 Large Hadron Collider Era

In everyday terms, this energy isn’t so great – a flying mosquito has about 1
TeV of kinetic energy. What makes the LHC so special is that this energy is
concentrated in a region a thousand billion times smaller than a speck of dust.

The LHC is the latest in a long tradition of particle accelerators used to

explore the building blocks of matter and the forces that act between them. Nearly
100 years ago, New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford revealed the structure of
the atom by firing alpha particles at a thin gold foil.

Similarly, in the 1930s physicists used electromagnetic fields to accelerate

protons to high energies inside long vacuum tubes. At very high energies the
protons were smashed apart, only for the fragments and collision energy to be
transformed into other particles.

Exotic output
So great is the concentration of energy at the LHC that it recreates
conditions similar to those 10-25 seconds after the big bang, soon after the particles
and forces that shape our universe came into being. With so much energy
available, the LHC should be able to create certain massive particles for the first
time in the lab.

Among them, physicists hope, will be the Higgs boson, the particle that
gives others their masses. They will also be looking for signs of a theoretical
supersymmetry that might give us clues about how the forces looked in the early
universe.

Supersymmetry predicts that every particle we know has a heavy

supersymmetric partner. The lightest supersymmetric particle is also a promising
candidate for dark matter, the invisible entity thought to amount to 95% of the
universe’s mass.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 2

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Fig 2: LHC powers up again

The Higgs and supersymmetry are on firm theoretical footing. Some theorists
speculate about more outlandish scenarios for the LHC, including the production
of extra dimensions, mini black holes, new forces, and particles smaller than
quarks and electrons. A test for time travel has also been proposed.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to be commissioned in 2005, will

provide particle physics withthe first laborator y tool to access the energy frontier
above 1 TeV. In order to achieve this, protons must be accelerated and stored at 7
TeV, colliding with an unprecedented luminosity of 1034 cm- s-1. The 8.3 Tesla
guide field is obtained using conventional NbTi technology cooled to below the
lambda point of helium. Considerable modification of the infrastructure around the
existing Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) tunnel is needed to house the LHC
machine and detectors. A brief status report is given and future prospects are
discussed.

What is large hadron collider and it’s and it’s

principle
Cryogenics is the branch of physics that deals with the production and
effects of very low temperatures. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest
cryogenic system in the world and one of the coldest places on Earth. All of the
magnets on the LHC are electromagnets – magnets in which the magnetic field is

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 3

 Large Hadron Collider Era

produced by the flow of electric current. The LHC's main magnets operate at a
temperature of 1.9 K (-271.3°C), colder than the 2.7 K (-270.5°C) of outer space.
The LHC's cryogenic system requires 40,000 leak-tight pipe seals, 40 MW of
electricity – 10 times more than is needed to power a locomotive – and 120 tonnes
of helium to keep the magnets at 1.9 K.

Extreme cold for exceptional performances

Magnets produce a magnetic field of 8.33 tesla to keep particle beams on

course around the LHC's 27-kilometre ring. A current of 11,850 amps in the
magnet coils is needed to reach magnetic fields of this amplitude. The use of
superconducting materials – those that conduct electricity with no resistance – has
proven to be the best way of avoiding overheating in the coils and of keeping them
as small as possible.

Fig 3:

Superconductivity could not happen without the use of cryogenic systems. The
coils' niobium-titanium (NbTi) wires must be kept at low temperatures to reach a
superconducting state. The LHC's superconducting magnets are therefore
maintained at 1.9 K (-271.3°C) by a closed liquid-helium circuit.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 4

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Cryogenic techniques essentially serve to cool the superconducting

magnets. In particle detectors they are also used to keep heavy gases such as argon
or krypton in a liquid state, for detecting particles in calorimeters.

Three steps to cooling

The layout of the LHC magnet cooling system is based on five "cryogenic
islands" which distribute the cooling fluid and convey kilowatts of cooling power
over several kilometres.

The entire cooling process takes weeks to complete. It consists of three

different stages. During the first stage, helium is cooled to 80 K and then to 4.5 K.
It is injected into the cold masses of the magnets in a second stage, before being
cooled to a temperature of 1.9 K in the third and final stage.

During the first stage, some 10,000 tonnes of liquid nitrogen are used in
heat exchangers in the refrigerating equipment to bring the temperature of the
helium down to 80 K.

The helium is then cooled to 4.5 K (-268.7°C) using turbines. Once the
magnets have been filled, the 1.8 K refrigeration units bring the temperature down
yet further to 1.9 K (-271.3°C). In total, the cryogenics system cools some 36,000
tonnes of magnet cold masses.

Construction

Fig4:LHC by CERN map

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 5

 Large Hadron Collider Era

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful
particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest
addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring
of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the
energy of the particles along the way.

Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the
speed of light before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite
directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are
guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by
superconducting electromagnets.

Fig 5: Fermilab

The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that
operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without
resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to -271.3°C – a
temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, much of the accelerator is
connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as
well as to other supply services.

Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the
beams around the accelerator. These include 1232 dipole magnets 15 metres in
length which bend the beams, and 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 metres long,

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 6

 Large Hadron Collider Era

which focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to
"squeeze" the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The
particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two
needles 10 kilometres apart with such precision that they meet halfway.

All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure
are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From here, the beams
inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring,
corresponding to the positions of four particle detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE
and LHCb.

Fig 6:figure shows the positions of components of LHC

Design

The 3.8-metre (12 ft) wide concrete-lined tunnel, constructed between 1983
and 1988, was formerly used to house the Large Electron–Positron Collider. It
crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, with most of

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 7

 Large Hadron Collider Era

France. Surface buildings hold ancillary equipment such as compressors,

ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.

The collider tunnel contains two adjacent parallel beamlines (or beam
pipes) each containing a beam, which travel in opposite directions around the ring.
The beams intersect at four points around the ring, which is where the particle
collisions take place. Some 1,232 dipole magnets keep the beams on their circular
path , while an additional 392 quadrupole magnets are used to keep the beams
focused, with stronger quadrupole magnets close to the intersection points in order
to maximize the chances of interaction where the two beams cross. Magnets of
higher multipole orders are used to correct smaller imperfections in the field
geometry. In total, about 10,000 superconducting magnets are installed, with the
dipole magnets having a mass of over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of
super fluid helium-4 is needed to keep the magnets, made of copper-clad niobium-
titanium, at their operating temperature of 1.9 K (−271.25 °C), making the LHC
the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature. During
LHC operations, the CERN site draws roughly 200 MW of electrical power from
the French electrical grid, which, for comparison, is about one-third the energy
consumption of the city of Geneva; the LHC accelerator and detectors draw about
120 MW there of.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 8

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Fig 7: shows the structure lhc dipole magnents

When running at the current energy record of 6.5 TeV per proton,[33] once
or twice a day, as the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 6.5 TeV, the field
of the superconducting dipole magnets will be increased from 0.54 to 7.7 teslas
(T). The protons each have an energy of 6.5 TeV, giving a total collision energy of
13 TeV. At this energy the protons have a Lorentz factor of about 6,930 and move
at about 0.999999990 c, or about 3.1 m/s (11 km/h) slower than the speed of light
(c). It takes less than 90 microseconds (μs) for a proton to travel 26.7 km around
the main ring. This results in 11,245 revolutions per second for protons whether
the particles are at low or high energy in the main ring, since the speed difference
between these energies is beyond the fifth decimal.

Rather than having continuous beams, the protons are bunched together,
into up to 2,808 bunches, with 115 billion protons in each bunch so that
interactions between the two beams take place at discrete intervals, mainly 25
nanoseconds (ns) apart, providing a bunch collision rate of 40 MHz. It was
operated with fewer bunches in the first years. The design luminosity of the LHC

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 9

 Large Hadron Collider Era

is 1034 cm−2s−1, which was first reached in June 2016. By 2017 twice this value
was achieved.

Fig 8 : shows LHC protons originate from the small red hydrogen tank.

Before being injected into the main accelerator, the particles are prepared
by a series of systems that successively increase their energy. The first system is
the linear particle accelerator LINAC 2 generating 50-MeV protons, which feeds
the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB). There the protons are accelerated to 1.4
GeV and injected into the Proton Synchrotron (PS), where they are accelerated to
26 GeV. Finally the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is used to increase their
energy further to 450 GeV before they are at last injected (over a period of several
minutes) into the main ring. Here the proton bunches are accumulated, accelerated
(over a period of 20 minutes) to their peak energy, and finally circulated for 5 to
24 hours while collisions occur at the four intersection points.

The LHC physics programme is mainly based on proton–proton collisions.

However, shorter running periods, typically one month per year, with heavy-ion
collisions are included in the programme. While lighter ions are considered as
well, the baseline scheme deals with lead ions (see A Large Ion Collider

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 10

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Experiment). The lead ions are first accelerated by the linear accelerator LINAC 3,
and the Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) is used as an ion storage and cooler unit. The
ions are then further accelerated by the PS and SPS before being injected into LHC
ring, where they reached an energy of 2.3 TeV per nucleon (or 522 TeV per ion),
higher than the energies reached by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The aim of
the heavy-ion programme is to investigate quark–gluon plasma, which existed in
the early universe.

Detectors

Seven detectors have been constructed at the LHC, located underground in

large caverns excavated at the LHC's intersection points. Two of them, the ATLAS
experiment and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), are large general-purpose
particle detectors. ALICE and LHCb have more specific roles and the last three,
TOTEM, MoEDAL and LHCf, are very much smaller and are for very specialized
research. The ATLAS and CMS experiments discovered the Higgs boson, which is
strong evidence that the Standard Model has the correct mechanism of giving mass
to elementary particles.

CMS Detector for LHC

Fig 9: shows the image of CERN super collider detector

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 11

 Large Hadron Collider Era

The BBC's Summary of the main detectors is:

Detector Description
ATLAS One of two general-purpose detectors. ATLAS studies the
Higgs boson and looks for signs of new physics, including
the origins of mass and extra dimensions.
CMS The other general-purpose detector, like ATLAS, studies the
Higgs boson and look for clues of new physics.
ALICE ALICE is studying a "fluid" form of matter called quark–
gluon plasma that existed shortly after the Big Bang.
LHCb Equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the
Big Bang. LHCb investigates what happened to the
"missing" antimatter.

Working principle

The principle behind the LHC is pretty simple. First, you fire two beams of
particles along two pathways, one going clockwise and the other going
counterclockwise. You accelerate both beams to near the speed of light.

Then, you direct both beams toward each other and watch what happens.
The equipment necessary to achieve that goal is far more complex. The LHC is
just one part of the overall CERN particle accelerator facility. Before any protons
or ions enter the LHC, they've already gone through a series of steps.

Working:

Device called a collimator at near light speed, producing a shower of

particle debris recorded in this image. About an hour later the beam completed a
full circuit of the 27km tunnel, to cheers from physicists.

CERN

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 12

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Protons have made their first complete lap of the world’s most powerful
accelerator to cheers and high fives from assembled physicists.

At 1025 (local time) scientists sent a single beam of protons in a clockwise

direction around the full 27 kilometres of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN
laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The journey began at 0930 when LHC project leader Lyn Evans and his
team launched protons into the ring. Progress was made in short steps of a few
kilometres, so that physicists could learn how to steer the beam, which is travelling
at 99.9998% the speed of light.

Fig 10: LHC in a nut shell (atlas detector photography)

The principle behind the LHC is pretty simple. First, you fire two beams of
particles along two pathways, one going clockwise and the other going
counterclockwise. You accelerate both beams to near the speed of light. Then, you
direct both beams toward each other and watch what happens.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 13

 Large Hadron Collider Era

The equipment necessary to achieve that goal is far more complex. The
LHC is just one part of the overall CERN particle accelerator facility. Before any
protons or ions enter the LHC, they've already gone through a series of steps used
to investigate many aspects of particle physics. Their job is to speed up and
increase the energy of a beam of particles by generating electric fields that
accelerate the particles, and magnetic fields that steer and focus them.

An accelerator comes either in the form of a ring (a circular accelerator),

where a beam of particles travels repeatedly round a loop, or in a straight line (a
linear accelerator), where the particle beam travels from one end to the other. At
CERN a number of accelerators are joined together in sequence to reach
successively higher energies.

The type of particle used depends on the aim of the experiment. The Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerates and collides protons, and also heavy lead ions.
One might expect the LHC to require a large source of particles, but protons for
beams in 27-kilometre ring come from a single bottle of hydrogen gas, replaced
only twice per year to ensure that it is running at the correct pressure. How to
accelerate protons In the first part of the accelerator, an electric field strips
hydrogen atoms (consisting of one proton and one electron) of their electrons.
Electric fields along the accelerator switch from positive to negative at a given
frequency, pulling charged particles forwards along the accelerator. CERN
engineers control the frequency of the change to ensure the particles accelerate not
in a continuous stream, but in closely spaced “bunches”.

Radiofrequency (RF) cavities

These are specially designed metallic chambers, spaced at intervals along

the accelerator –are shaped to resonate at specific frequencies, allowing radio
waves to interact with passing particle bunches.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 14

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Fig 11: RF cavities

Each time a beam passes the electric field in an RF cavity, some of the energy
from the radio waves is transferred to the particles, nudging them forwards. It’s
important that the particles do not collide with gas molecules on their journey
through the accelerator, so the beam is contained in an ultrahigh vacuum inside a
metal pipe – the beam pipe.

To accelerate particles, the accelerators are fitted with metallic chambers

containing an electromagnetic field known as radiofrequency (RF) cavities.
Charged particles injected into this field receive an electrical impulse that
accelerates them.

Assembly of cavities for the HIE-ISOLDE accelerator (Image: Maximilien

Brice/CERN) In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 16 RF cavities are housed in
four cylindrical refrigerators called cryomodules, which enable them to work in a
superconducting state.

Each cavity is driven by a high-power klystron, which is a tube containing

electron beams. The electron beams are intensity-modulated to a frequency of 400
MHz, or 400 million oscillations per second. A rectangular pipe of conducting
metal called a waveguide directs energy to the cavity. The cavity’s shape has been
specifically designed to achieve resonance and the build up in intensity of the

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 15

 Large Hadron Collider Era

electromagnetic waves. Each cavity can reach a maximum voltage of 2 megavolts

(MV), corresponding to 16 MV per beam.

Fig 12: Maximilien Brice/CERN

One of the module containing the accelerating cavities for the LHC .The LHC’s
RF cavities bring the 450 GeV energy of the particles (1 GeV = 1 billion
electronvolts) to 6.5 TeV (1 TeV = 1 million million electronvolts) - more than 14
times their injection energy. The maximum energy is reached in around 20 minutes
with the bunches having passed through the RF cavities more than 10 million
times.

The field in an RF cavity is made to oscillate (switch direction) at a given

frequency, so timing the arrival of particles is important. In the LHC, each RF
cavity is tuned to oscillate at v400 MHz. When the beam has reached the required
energy, an ideally timed proton with exactly the right energy will not be
accelerated. By contrast, protons with slightly different energies arriving earlier or
later will be accelerated or decelerated so that they stay close to the desired energy.
In this way, the particle beam is sorted into packs of protons called "bunches".

Assembly of two crab cavities for the High-Luminosity LHC

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 16

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Fig 13: Juliean ordan by CERN

Aside from these accelerating cavities, CERN is developing “crab” cavities

for the LHC’s successor, the High-Luminosity LHC. The purpose of these crab
cavities is to give a transverse momentum to steer the particles as they approach of
collider.

Placement of collider in Swizerland

The Large Hadron Collider is located at CERN, the European Organization

for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland. This is CERN's Globe of Science
and Innovation, which hosts a small museum about particle physics inside. The
ATLAS experiment is housed.

The Large Hadron Collider is located at CERN, the European Organization

for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland. This is CERN's Globe of Science
and Innovation, which hosts a small museum about particle physics inside. The
ATLAS experiment is housed underground nearby

The future of the LHC takes shape

New magnets designed for the High-Luminosity LHC - the Large Hadron
Collider upgrade project – are in the prototype phase

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 17

 Large Hadron Collider Era

At the Large Hadron Collider, a peek at the future of science

Fig 14: LHC peak at the futures of science

Visitors inspect the statue “Wandering the Immeasurable” by Canadian

artist Gayle Hermick. Inside the statue’s spiraling bands are etched singular
scientific achievements displayed in chronological order. Behind the statue and
covered in wooden panels is CERN’s iconic Globe of Science and Innovation.
(Alamy Stock Photo)

Article By Richard Morin

September 20, 2019 at 8:00 AM EDT

“Don’t lose sight of me.”

Physicist Abhigyan Dasgupta — “Riju” to his family and friends — looks

over his shoulder to caution our 12-member group as we prepare to descend 300
feet beneath the French countryside into the largest machine on Earth: the $4.7
billion Large Hadron Collider.

Big Science doesn’t get much bigger than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
on the campus of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility
outside Geneva. The LHC runs in a circular 16.7-mile underground tunnel that
crisscrosses the Swiss and French border. More than 1,200 superconducting

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 18

 Large Hadron Collider Era

magnets, each 50 feet long and weighing 35 tons and joined end-to-end, make up
the collider’s ring. Guided by the magnets, trillions of protons circulate at nearly
light speed in opposite directions inside a pair of two-inch-diameter tubes. At four
points along the ring, aiming magnets send the two counter-rotating beams
crashing into each other.

These collisions blast the protons into subatomic smithereens. Detectors

weighing thousands of tons — think of them as giant cameras — positioned at the
collision points record three-dimensional images of each of the 40 million proton
mash-ups that occur every second. Aided by high-speed computers and algorithms
of mind-bending complexity, scientists pore over the tracks left by these impacts
for clues about the origins of our universe and the existence of extra dimensions,
and for undiscovered particles that might usher in a new era of discovery in the
physical sciences.

The Large Hadron Collider is in the first months of a two-year technical

shutdown for maintenance and upgrades. During that time, visitors lucky enough
to secure a place on a CERN guided tour can go deep underground to visit the
cavern that houses the gigantic detectors. When researchers switch the collider
back on in early 2021, visitors will receive a more limited underground tour until
the next two-year stop in 2025.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 19

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Visitors walk among displays in the Universe of Particles exhibition hall.

Every half-hour, a six-minute ”immersive audio-visual experience” tracks the
history of the universe and describes the fundamental research questions that
CERN scientists are attempting to answer using the Large Hadron Collider.
(Richard Morin/Richard Morin for The Washington Post)

Dasgupta lets us in and we board the freight elevator that will take us 300
feet down to the detector chamber. At the bottom, we pick up orange hard hats
fitted with a computer chip so that security can track our precise location. We walk
along a long passageway, its walls hung with photos of the collider and
informational posters.

Dasgupta, a natural teacher who has just completed his physics PhD at
UCLA, switches into data-delivery mode. He explains that, at full power, a proton
makes 11,245 trips around the collider ring every second. Instead of a continuous
stream, the protons travel in bunches, or packets. Each packet contains 110 billion
protons and is spaced 25 nanoseconds apart, an interval of about 25 billionths of a
second. Before a proton is annihilated, it will be traveling at 99.9999991 percent
the speed of light, he says.

It is here, Dasgupta says, where electronic hardware and computer software

winnow the 40 million collisions that occur every second to the 1,000 most
interesting ones. These are stored for further analysis.

The detector is split horizontally in half like a giant melon. The two halves
are pulled apart to allow workers access to the detector’s inner workings. They will
be inched back together and the proton beam tubes reunited when the work is
complete.

It’s anything but compact. The detector measures nearly 70 feet long and 50
feet wide and, at 14,000 tons, weighs about twice as much as the Eiffel Tower.

It’s also beautiful. Concentric rings of gold and candy-apple red detectors
encircle the proton beam tubes at its center. Lime-green supports help hold the

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 20

 Large Hadron Collider Era

electronics in place. Shimmering metal that looks like aluminum foil catches the
industrial lights. It could be a space station. Or a half-billion-dollar piece of art.

We can almost touch it. It’s so close and so big and so everywhere that it’s
hard not to be awed, overwhelmed and a bit intimidated. I can do little more than
stare

Fig 15 :visitors view

Abhigyan Dasgupta, a physicist and CERN tour guide, describes for visitors
a to-scale cross-sectional photograph of the Compact Muon Solenoid. When in
operation, this is as close as visitors come to viewing the 14,000-ton detector that
lies in a cavern 300 feet below. (Richard Morin/Richard Morin for The
Washington Post)

The acronym CERN is derived from the French words Conseil Européen
pour la Recherche Nucléaire. CERN was founded in 1954 as one of Europe’s first
joint ventures after World War II. Right now, 23 member countries together pay
$1 billion a year to keep CERN’s lights on and the molecules spinning.

Work on the CMS experiment began in 1999. Dasgupta said the detector
recorded its first proton collisions in 2009. Three years later, CERN rocked the
scientific world when its researchers announced that CMS and ATLAS, its sister

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 21

 Large Hadron Collider Era

experiment on the collider’s ring, had discovered the elusive Higgs boson. The
discovery ended a 50-year search for what became known as the “God Particle,”
the last piece needed to validate the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory
that explains three of the universe’s four fundamental forces — except for gravity
— and all its elementary particles.

The announcement was made in a packed CERN auditorium on July 4,

2012 — a date that some physicists celebrated as “Higgsmas.” Today, an empty
bottle of champagne, opened and drained by those researchers, is displayed on the
wall of the Microcosm, the virtual tour of the collider and its key experiments.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR THE LARGE HADRON

COLLIDER?

All things end.

Particle physics experiment5s typically end when the scientific returns on

running the experiment longer are so low that it no longer makes sense to run the
experiment. The LHC has set up a full physics program to run until the early
2030s. This is a testament to the leadership at CERN that runs the LHC.

Running an accelerator in the same mode of operation is a losing

proposition from a return-on-investment point of view. If you’re running at the

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 22

 Large Hadron Collider Era

same energy and have the same rate of collisions, your data just scales linearly
with time.

Currently the LHC is essentially at its maximal energy — 13 TeV, a bit

beneath its design energy of 14 TeV. They may be able to eke out a bit more
energy over the next decade. But for all intents and purposes, the LHC is tapped
out on energy.

Once you’ve fully upgraded your experiment, you have a fixed window of
time before you’re done. From pragmatic point of view, if you need to improve a
physics result to get a PhD, and if the time needed to improve a physics result is
more than 3–5 years, the experiment is over.

The final phase of the LHC will run in 3–5 years, and at that point you’re at
the upper limit of the LHC’s reach. Running significantly longer won’t give
graduate students interesting PhD theses.

Resolving Power and Discoveries

Since most physics analyses are statistically limited, the resolution/accuracy

is proportional to the Signal divided by the square root of the Background. The
Signal and Background are both growing linearly with time, so you are gaining
resolving power like the square root of time.

To precisely measure quantites, the LHC is taking four times as long to

double the precision — in the best circumstances. In reality, systematic errors can
appear that can prevent the experiments from reaching this level of accuracy.

Eventually, the experiments will be dominated by stematic errors and no

amount of data-taking will improve the results. What ends up happening is that the
experiments start to accumulate more and more unexplained excesses that are
driven by weird systematic effects. These excesses obviously could be the first
signs of new physics, but (after usually years of study) they are explained by
ordinary physics acting in weird ways.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 23

 Large Hadron Collider Era

The LHC is a discovery machine rather than a precision measurement

machine. Discovery in particle physics is usually about reaching the highest
energies possible.

Protons are big fluffy objects and it’s hard to get a high energy collision out
of them. Typical rates for processes fall like the fifth to seventh power of the
energy that is being probed.

The reach in energy/mass growth is like the one tenth to one fourteenth
power of time. So after running for one year, running for 10 years will get you
25% more reach!

That’s a tough proposition, because most of the benefit of proton colliders

comes at the beginning of the experiment. Thus if, you are a particle physicist and
happen to be lucky enough to be doing science when a collider starts running, you
should put all your effort into the first few years since that is when discoveries are
going to happen.

Planned LHC Upgrades

CERN knew that the interesting scientific results occurring early on would
be a problem, so they planned to try to extend the science of the LHC as long as
possible. The LHC is going to upgrade its rate of collisions over time so that it will
accumulate more data at a faster and faster pace. This planned increase in the
collision rate will help overcome the diminishing returns.

The operative quantity that physicists speak about is the integrated

luminosity, which is measured in the wonderful unit of inverse femtobarns (an
inverse area). Currently the LHC is approaching 20 inverse femtobarns of data. By
its final shutdown it will be 3,000 inverse femtobarns — an increase of 150. This
will result in a 65% gain in reach over the next 15 or so years.

These increases in luminosity change a three to five year scientific program

into a 15 year scientific program. When all is said and done, the LEP tunnel that
the LHC is housed in will have produced science from 1989 to 2034 — 45 years!

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 24

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Unfortunately this will end the cutting edge science that can be done in this tunnel
and a new tunnel will have to be constructed.

The one caveat is that if there are no excesses and the LHC is setting 2
sigma limits and you really care about 5 sigma discoveries, you need six times the
amount of data to go from a 2 sigma exclusion to a 5 sigma discovery. If there are
no excesses this summer, there will only be a 38% increase in energy if you’re
looking for discoveries.

On the End of the Line

The reason that the LHC will end is that they can’t increase the luminosity
beyond what they will be able to achieve in the final phases of the LHC, where
there will be hundreds of protons colliding every time the beams cross. Simply
running it just isn’t going to produce many interesting physics results because of
the loss in resolving power and the fact that the protons are running out of energy.

The collisions at the last phase of the LHC will collide 200 protons together
at once. Researching these collisions will require unraveling all of the collisions
and looking for an incredibly rare process inside these complicated events. The
detectors age rapidly from the radiation damage as well.

With luck, there will be a successor to the LHC that will be around the
corner, if not operating. If not, it will be the end of particle physics. Since
accelerators require 15 to 20 years to build, in order to not have a gap,
commitments for new accelerators need to be happening now.

Sadly, the United States is no longer a viable place to do particle physics. It

has not been since the Tevatron shutdown in 2011. Furthermore, the US has no
plans to continue any significant research in particle physics with the primary
funding agency, the Department of Energy, happy to let US particle physics fade
out.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 25

 Large Hadron Collider Era

CONCLUSION
LHC the world most powerful particle accelerator has successfully
concluded its proton smashing 2010. But power does not tell the whole story.
Particle accelerator are like flash lights the brighter they are, the more you can see,
brightness in the case, corresponds to the number of collisions and here the LHC
has been little less impressive over the course of the run( which started late
march). The collider has produced just 50 inwards picobarns worth of data. The
units of particle physics are quite confusing but this is about what the tevatron can
do this in a week.

The good news is that the future runs to should produce more data quickly.
The LHC reached its targets for “brightness” or Intensity” in mid October.

The proton experiments may take break, but the LHC won’t for now any
way. It’s now preparing to collide lead ions for further studies. Those experiments
will replicate conditions shortly after the big bang and should tell scientists more
about the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together inside the nuclei of
atoms.

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 26

 Large Hadron Collider Era

REFERENCES

 Davies P (1984). “God and the New Physics”

 Evans Lyndon (2009) “The large Hadron Collider: A Marvel of
technology”
 Carroll, Sean M. (2013). “ The particle at the end of the universe”
 CERN Official Website www.cern.com
 www.google.co.in
 www.wikipedia.org

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 27

 Large Hadron Collider Era

Department of Physics, SSC Shivamogga Page 28