In October I had a fascinating tour of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Large Hadron Collider consists of a super cooled ring 27 km in circumference with a precision of 0.1mm at the targets. Beams of protons and anti-protons circle the ring in opposite directions at 99% the speed of light and are brought to collision at 3 detectors around the ring. The beams have an area of 20 microns2 and the energy of a high speed train.
Superconducting magnets control and steer the beams. Precision requires compensation for the tidal forces affecting the nearby mountains. The magnets remind me of the windings in very large electric motors, but of course are super cooled.
We had an explanation of the Atlas detector. When operating, the Atlas detector sees 40,000 beam collisions per second. Each collision produces many particles (1 billion per second) whose trajectories are tracked by silicon detectors and interesting events are logged on supercomputers.
CERN produces about 1% of all data on earth. CERN is the birthplace of the World Wide Web which was developed to transmit the tremendous volume of data.
The tour was guided by a working physicist able to answer my questions. Due to the high energy, we were not permitted near the ring. We did see control rooms where operators controlled the beams and physicists monitored the results.
Very interesting and geeky enough for me! Be sure to reserve the tour your next visit to Geneva.