How the Largest Machine in the World Looks Like
Explore the thrill of visiting the largest particle accelerator located 100 metres underground at CERN, Switzerland
I clenched my phone tightly as I stood on the topmost floor of the biggest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
In truth, the LHC is so massive (roughly 27 kilometres in circumference), that it is divided into four locations hosting detectors where the beams are collided to find new particles. Out of the four locations, I got an opportunity to visit the largest particle detector, ATLAS, on my fifth day at CERN as a trainee.
Right here on July 4th, 2012, ATLAS along with the CMS detector announced that they had each observed a new particle, what is now commonly known as the “God particle” or Higgs Boson. But did you ever wonder why the Higgs Boson was called the God particle?
Because it was simply so goddamn hard to find!
“God” or the “most wanted”, it is a particle that physicists have certainly been desperate to find. The publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title,” said Jim Baggott, the author of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’.
The discovery of Higgs Boson explained a fundamental truth and happened in a…
