Large Hadron Collider and Higgs Boson

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 would be remembered a great day in the history of science for the successful completion of experimentation of proton collision. The event would be remembered as a great step in understanding the Big Bang and creation of the Universe. The experiment was completed at 0836 GMT (10.36 IST) in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) developed by the scientists of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) under the directions of Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN and Lyn Evans the Project Leader. The huge particle smashing machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is built underneath the Swiss-French border at the cost of 9 billion dollars. Physicists around the world now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

According to a theory propagated by an Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose and later endorsed by the British scientist Peter Higgs in 1964, it is believed that the collision of Hadrons (protons) was the cause of creation of matter. The experiment is a great leap to testify the theory that there exists a "Higgs Boson" that gives matter its mass. The particle has been named after Higgs and Bose the conceivers and propagators of the theory.

The entire credit goes to creative thinking and logical reasoning. In your daily life you watch the electron collider daily as the picture tube (CRT) of your television. Here accelerated electrons strike the stationary electrons in the phosphor coating on the inner side of the picture tube to form the images. In a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) images are formed due to collisions of electrons of the electron beam with electrons or protons of uranium and lead atoms. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a tunnel of 17 mile circumference, wherein protons or hadrons were made to collide at very high acceleration, probably the speed of light. The construction principle of the LHC and an Electron Microscope is identical in every aspect except for the cooling system since in the LHC the accelerating voltage for the protons ranges from 450 giga electron volts (GeV) to 7 tera electron volts (TeV) hence higher generation of heat and efficient cooling system is necessary. The temperature of superconducting magnets in LHC is maintained at -271.1 degree Celsius with liquid helium which makes it largest cryogenic facility in the world till date. The astronomical black holes are much different from the microscopic black holes supposed to be produced in the LHC. There was nothing to panic thinking about microscopic black holes.