CERN’s LHC First Beam

 “The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built and the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator is located 100 m underground and runs through both French and Swiss territory.”

The LHC is a huge (and I mean HUGE) machine built to be part of CERN’s scientific complex. The size of this particle accelerator is 26659 meters (circumference) with a total of 9300 magnets inside which will be pre-cooled to 80 Kelvin (-193.2 degrees Celsius) using more the 10 thousand tonnes of liquid nitrogen. These will also be filled with about 60 tonnes of liquid helium so that they can reach the temperature of 1.9 K (-271.3 degrees Celsius). That’s less than 2 degrees above absolute zero.

After 20 years of hard work LHC is ready to fire the first beam this Wednesday (10 September 2008) after passing the final test of its synchronization systems.You can watch this event online through http://webcast.cern.ch/.

For more information about the largest particle collision ever built you can visit CERN’s website.