Smashing Particles at Near-Light Speed: A Visual Guide to the Large Hadron Collider

By Andrew McCollum On Jul 7, 2022

A global effort to gain a more complete understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe resumed Tuesday near Geneva, as the world’s largest particle collider restarted scientific operations after about a three-year hiatus for maintenance and upgrades.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, features a 17-mile circular tunnel in which particles like protons are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and then smashed into each other to produce showers of smaller particles. The smashups are analyzed with the help of specialized detectors arrayed around the ring in the hope that the data will reveal previously unknown subatomic particles. That is what happened a decade ago, when CERN scientists announced the discovery of the much-ballyhooed Higgs boson, a particle that gives all matter its mass.

Physicists hope the upgraded facility—now featuring more powerful magnets and other upgrades that make it possible to smash together more protons at higher energy levels—will yield fresh insights into subatomic particles and the forces governing their interactions. The coming research could even help explain the shadowy cousin of ordinary matter known as dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up around one-quarter of the universe.

Animation showing two particles traveling towards each other. After they collide, tiny particles come from the collision.

Here’s a step-by-step look at what’s happening inside the upgraded LHC:

Visualization showing the 16.7 miles-wide ring over an aerial photo of the area where it is located. The area shown is about 400 square miles and covers Switzerland and parts of of France.

CERN operates a series of particle accelerators and building-sized instruments buried more than 300 feet under the Swiss-French border.

Together, these machines accelerate beams of protons and other particles to nearly the speed of light – 186,000 miles per second or about 670 million miles per hour.

At higher speeds, particles can carry more energy and thus produce more energetic collisions.

Image showing the complete Large Hadron Collider facilites overlaying the aerial photo of the area.

The Large Hadron Collider is the final accelerator in the series. Inside this vast subterranean ring, superconducting magnets guide the fast-moving particle beams headlong into one another.

When the beams collide, the energy within the particles is transformed into matter, creating other particles with exotic names like neutrino, tetraquark and W boson – and possibly particles that have never before been observed.

Animation showing particles coming out from Linac4.

The protons used at the LHC come from a single bottle of hydrogen gas. During the initial phases of the acceleration process – which begin with the Linear accelerator 4, or Linac4 – an electric field helps strip the hydrogen atoms of their electrons, leaving only protons in the beam of particles.

Animation showing particles going through accelerators.

The proton beams are then accelerated via a series of accelerators that help boost the beams’ energy and get them moving at speeds more than 99% of the speed of light. That series includes the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB), Proton Synchrotron (PS) and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). Inside these beams, the protons are distributed as thin bursts about eight inches long – each roughly the size of a spaghetti strand.

Animation showing particles traveling inside the Large Hadron Collider ring.

During the LHC’s last run, which ended in 2018, each of these bursts – around 2,500 per beam – contained about 110 billion protons. During the new run, the upgrades will increase the number of protons per burst, and raise the number of bursts per beam. More protons per beam means more discoveries are likely.

The beams are then guided — physicists say injected – into the LHC. There the collider’s powerful magnets further accelerate the beams.

Animation showing new particles going in the opposite direction inside the large hadron collider.

Some beams are sent racing around the ring clockwise, others counterclockwise.

At maximum energy, each proton in a beam holds 6.8 trillion electronvolts. For research purposes, that’s a vast sum. Yet it’s roughly equivalent to the energy released when seven mosquitoes hit a surface.

Animation showing two particle beams moving against each other with magnets on top and the bottom of it.

The LHC’s magnets then squeeze the beams to roughly the thickness of a human hair and steer them into one another. When two beams collide, the energy in the collisions is a record-breaking 13.6 trillion electronvolts. That’s nearly double the collision energy from the LHC’s first run more than a decade ago.

Animation showing how magnets squeeze two beams causing collisions.

The more tightly focused these bursts are, the more likely it is that protons will collide with one another. Physicists want to boost the number of smashups because some of the particles they want to study only get produced one out of every trillion collisions or so.

Though they contain tens of billions of protons, the beams are mostly empty space. And when they collide, only a small number of protons moving in one direction strike protons moving in the other.

When fast-moving protons collide, the resulting shower of smaller particles is detected by the instruments arrayed around the ring. The data is stored for later analysis by physicists at CERN and beyond.

Write to Juanje Gómez at [email protected] and Aylin Woodward at [email protected]

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