With so much work to do on so many aspects of the Large Hadron Collider—the accelerator, detectors, software, physics, and so on—it’s hard not to get a bit lost.
Every time I take visitors to see the Large Hadron Collider, I’m reminded of the extent of the international collaboration that has made this project possible.
Meeting in CERN’s Restaurant 1, anthropologist Arpita Roy of the University of California, Berkeley is quick to declare that she will not be having any more coffee today. She has begun drinking multiple cups per day as she meets with CERN physicists to learn about their work.
The world of particle physics is changing. In a few years time, most large particle colliders will have closed; the only one left operating will be the Large Hadron Collider at CERN outside Geneva, Switzerland.
Bird watchers have "life lists" of species they hope to see in their lifetimes. Why shouldn't particle physics fans do the same? With that in mind, in our April issue we asked readers to help us put together the first particle physics life list.
In August 2006, after almost a year of preparation, we packed up all our belongings to move from Batavia, Illinois, to Geneva, Switzerland. We were following our particle physics careers from Fermilab to CERN, the European particle physics lab.
Canada, affectionately known to Americans as the "Great White North," boasts the world's largest reserve of fresh water and the biggest oil reserves outside the Middle East.
Canadian subatomic physics has a lot going for it: sparkling new hardware, an influx of bright young minds, and key roles in international projects. But only by doubling its operating budget can it live up to that potential, a new report suggests.
A snowstorm hit the Chicago area on February 13, before the start of the DOE/NSF agency review at Fermilab of the US ATLAS and US CMS collaborations, the US contributions to two of the Large Hadron Collider experiments.
The United States has contributed the energy and expertise of hundreds of scientists and engineers, and more than half a billion dollars to the construction of the LHC particle collider and two of its experiments at the European laboratory CERN.
A proton travels around a 27-kilometer ring at nearly the speed of light. Along with a bunch of other protons, it passes through the hearts of each of a series of detectors more than ten thousand times per second. Then, on one pass, it slams into a proton coming from the other direction.
In pursuit of some of the most exciting science of our time, the Large Hadron Collider has pushed the boundaries of technology and the scale of science experiments to new extremes.
To deal with the computing demands of the LHC experiments, scientists have created the world's largest, most international distributed-computing system.
