The Large Hadron Collider: The Largest Machine in the World

la folks welcome back to another episode of mega projects this one is all about the LHC the Large Hadron Collider if you don't know where that is juror few years ago when everyone thought that there was a particle accelerator that was gonna make a black hole it was this those people were wrong they're probably the same people who are now burning down those 5g towers around the worlds because they are idiots anyway let's get into it smash that dislike button [Music] very deep below the French Swiss border lie is one of the largest most powerful and most expensive scientific instruments ever built that somewhat ironically studies the smallest known building blocks of our world the Large Hadron Collider LHC is unquestionably in the upper echelon of scientific discovery a project so big in terms of both physical size and human support numbers behind it that it is dwarfed almost everything that came before it is quite simply one of those experiments with a sweeping arc of discovery so large we may not fully understand its significance for many years to come I'm going to go into a lot more detail later in this video about different aspects of the LHC but I wanted to start with a very brief overview the LHC is attempting to collide two beams of hydrogen protons traveling at 99.9 percent the speed of light when these beams collide they break apart and it is by studying the results of these collisions that scientists hope that they may be able to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe you've probably heard about it concerning the search for the Higgs boson particle or you know the people who thought it was gonna destroy the world but the questions it is trying to answer go much further than that what is dark matter do all particles have a supersymmetric partner do extra dimensions existence watch the meaning of life obviously that last one is a joke but you get the idea about the level of complexity here [Music] the earliest colliders appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s with primitive examples appearing in Italy the USA and in the Soviet Union the first Collider at CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research and why that doesn't match up is because CERN is in French which built the LHC became operational in 1971 and was known as the intersecting storage rings and as you can see they've managed to improve their name since then this was the world's first hadron collider as previous colliders had attempted to work with electrons or positrons hadron is in fact a subatomic composite particle if you're wondering why the LHC is Underground's there are three reasons firstly there was already a handy tunnel dug that had been used for a previous Collider secondly real-estate prices on the surface are astronomical even for a house let alone a sprawling complex like the LHC thirdly colliders emit radiation so having its Underground's makes dealing with the waste significantly easier the LHC first went live on the 10th of September 2008 but its speed remained well below its target the stronger the collision was the better the data at this point the world record for a proton collision was 0.98 TeV tera electron volts per beam that's just below a million volts but the LHC was designed to reach 7 TeV per beam now the project was just over a week old when disaster struck a magnet quench incidents went magnets heat to above 9.6 Celsius above zero essentially causing their magnetic field to collapse and often leading to boil off cryogenic fluid led to serious damage to 53 of the superconducting magnets initial testing was delayed by 14 months while repairs took place when things were finally ready the LHC smashed the world record on the 30th of March 2010 when two beams collided with an energy of 3.5 TeV per beam during its first run between 2010 and 2013 the LHC was able to reach collisions with the force of 4 tera electron volts per beam and it was during this period that the LHC's most significant early discoveries took place this was followed by a two-year break known as the long shutdown in which the entire project was first extensively run to began in 2015 continuing until 2018 and the LHC was able to record collisions of 6.5 TeV per beam 13 TeV total the project is currently in its second long shutdown and is scheduled to be back online in 2021 at this point you might be wondering just how powerful these collisions are because tera electron volts dozen or even a million volts it doesn't really mean much to the layman but honestly it's really difficult for the human brain to understands because one T V is just greater than any force on earth with the exception of the LHC let alone 6.5 TV we're talking about energies that perhaps only occurs in space but even then we're not really sure [Music] all right so that was a lot of information so let's take a bit of a closer look firstly it probably doesn't look like you think it does the entire LHC is contained within a circular tunnel 17 miles that's twenty six point seven kilometers in circumference and 50 to 175 metres hundred sixty four to five hundred and seventy four feet underground as I said at the beginning it resides under the French Swiss border and in fact the concrete tunnel crosses the border four times imagine a sort of proton racetrack going around and around in an oval shape inside this tunnel two parallel pipes followed the track they are known as beam lines or beam pipes inside each pipe you guessed it our beams that are traveling around the racetrack each beam is traveling in the opposite direction one clockwise one anti-clockwise but this is so much more than just some sort of extravagant beam superhighway the whole purpose of the LHC comes down to the collisions scientists are actively trying to make these two beams collide at four separate areas known as crossing points these are the most important areas of the entire project now maybe all of that doesn't sound that difficult but let's take into account that these two beams are moving fractionally below the speed of light their fastest they are moving at two hundred and ninety nine point eight million meters per second and they are traveling around their underground racetrack doing eleven thousand two hundred and forty five laps every single second the difficulties of making these two beams collide best described in more layman terms it's like firing two needles at each other from a distance of ten kilometers and hoping that both points hit each other exactly in the middle unsurprisingly this uses plenty of power bar the LHC is in operation it uses about 200 megawatts from the French electrical grid which equates to about one-third of the entire consumption of Geneva for the same period it costs roughly 19 million euros to run every year while its total cost was in the region of 7 billion dollars to build everything about the LHC is grandiose and really kind of difficult to get your head around even the extreme cost if you combines the strand the superconducting cable which transfers powers to the magnets and essentially forces protons around their track it would stretch around the equator six point eight times if he pulled all of those apart and examine the filament inside it would stretch to the Sun and back five times with a bit to spare the beams that are flying around the racetrack are made up of hydrogen protons these have been constructed by injecting hydrogen gas into a metal cylinder than surrounding it with an electrical field which separates the gas into protons and electrons but you can't just let these protons loose on the main track they need a bit of warming up first that's probably not what the scientists use it but it's what we're gonna call it outside of the main loop there are several smaller loops each with their own accelerators which increase the speed of these proton bunches until they are fast enough to be injected into the main circuit the beams within the LHC are composed of bunches of protons which are released every 25 nanoseconds there are roughly 2,000 808 bunches within a single beam with around 120 billion separate protons in each Bunch so fair to say there are an absurd number of protons moving around the LHC at any one time but these beams they need to be controlled the LHC contains 1232 dipole magnets which are 15 meters 50 feet in length and are used to bend the beams there are also 392 quadrupole magnets each five to seven meters 16 to 22 feet long which are designed to focus the beams as the beams near each other at the crossing points they are squeezed even closer together to increase the chances of collisions in total there are nine thousand five hundred and ninety three magnets used to alter the direction and aim the beams in the LHC when these beams do collide and the LHC target is for around 800 million to 1 billion collisions per seconds the results a spectacular two beams successfully hitting each other will produce a temperature around a hundred thousand times the heat of the surface of the Sun it's just the human brain just can't comprehend just how hot that is just to give you a little bit of not really understandable contacts that is basically sort of the temperature that scientists believe existed at the point of the Big Bang to counteract these temperatures a cooling system circulates superfluid helium around the accelerator ring at minus 271 Celsius or minus 456 Fahrenheit which is colder than outer space so what happens when they collide well the dizzyingly fast racetrack is only a part of the LHC it also comes with seven detectors trying to record data from up to 1 billion collisions per second these detectors are enormous and they're probably what you think of when you imagine the LHC their chambers create a 3d model of what happens when the protons collide it as you can imagine this is a vast amount of information but a computer program whittles it down to about 100 of what it considers to be the most significance this means we are actually only recording about 0.004 percent of the collisions that have occurred the information is then stored and backed up before being sent around the world to various collaborators who are helping to sift through the deluge of data the amounts of information per year equates to around 1.2 million blu-ray discs or 250 years worth of video if you want to be a bit old-school this is around 30 petabytes and if you're new to petabytes that's about 30 million gigabytes principally physicists looking for rare events within these models they are examining what direction particles move after the collision which way they Bend and how they act and most interestingly which particles emerge from the collision two of the detectors a general-purpose colliders Atlas and compact moon solenoids CMS while the remaining Alice LHC be totem mode eland LHC F have specific purposes and don't worry we're not going to go into all of them we're just going to focus on two first up Atlas in July 2012 one of the most important discoveries in recent times came about from findings from the Atlas detector the discovery of the Higgs boson particle the final jigsaw piece in a 50 year old theory called the standard model of physics remains the grandest humans of the entire LHC project but the amount of human input and engineering prowess is simply mind-boggling so let's start with its size the Atlas detector is 46 meters long and 25 meters in diameter weighs it pretty hefty 7,000 tons and contains about 3000 kilometers of cables but what is truly astonishing is the number of people who have participated in this experiment and remember I'm not talking about the whole LHC this is just the Atlas detector approximately 3000 physicists taken from a hundred and eighty-three institutions in 38 countries played a role either in the developments or in the ongoing study using information from Atlas so what are they looking for well essentially signs of new physics which is a term used for fundamental developments that occurred in physics in the second half of the 20th century and continue to this day the origins of mass and the possibilities of extra dimensions are just two examples of new physics being studied at the LHC it's not searching for anything in particular but it's always on the lookout for something new the Higgs boson was merely a theory until 2012 when the Atlas was able to detect it it's so cutting-edge that we literally don't know what it's going to find the second detector that we'll take a closer look at is the Alice experiment which recorded the first proton collision in the LHC in November 2009 the Alice is all about exploring quark-gluon plasma that's the term for a fifth state of matter which occurs when quarks and gluons are freed this is thought to have happened in the brief seconds after the Big Bang by studying the fluid form scientists hope to be able to discover just how matter is organized again this detector is not small weighs 10,000 tons that makes it the heaviest detector at the LHC and it's 26 meters 85 feet long 16 metres 52 feet high and 16 meters wide the project is also supported by some 1,800 physicists engineers and technicians from 176 Institute's scattered across 41 countries so what has been discovered with such an extraordinary set of machine it can be easy to get carried away and expected discoveries that are going to change our lives the LHC has allowed us to begin to understand more of the universe but there's still a really long way to go the discovery of the higgs boson particle has been by far the most famous discovery but it's by no means the only one on March the 24th 2011 the LHC created quark-gluon plasma thought to be the densest matter in our universe outside of black holes on the 22nd of December 2011 a new composite particle was observed for the first time the 3p Bottineau Miam state in july 2012 two teams from two separate detectors cautiously reported the findings that pointed towards a completely new particle the world braced itself for the announcement of the Higgs boson but it wasn't until March 2013 the formal announcement was made on November the 19th 2014 the LHC b experiments found two new heavy subatomic particles both baryons [Music] as I've mentioned the LHC is currently not in operation particle physics experiments typically suffer from diminishing returns this is simply because the device gets to the point where it has achieved what it can with current specifications that doesn't mean things are finished but it does mean that an upgrade is needed several aspects can be improved with the LHC the energy of the collision is most obvious but considering the magnets involved or working at capacity this would be a massive upgrade the plan's high luminosity upgrade is the next step of this already futuristic experiment this has nothing to do with the energy of the collision but rather how much we can see by raising the chances of a collision this is done by altering the size of the beam and the spacing between each it's hoped that with this upgrade luminosity could be increased by a factor of 10 significantly raising the chances of seeing rare processes there are a few if any projects underway around the world with the same kind of scope as the Large Hadron Collider this is a mega project that has the power to influence not only things on earth but also our understanding of the universe in today's world we've become obsessed with speed and size but this is meant we've often overlooked the tiniest building blocks that form not just us but everything that surrounds us the LHC is the long game much of what has been discovered has absolutely no impact for humans on a day to day basis the discovery of a new particle is not particularly exciting for most people but only by taking a step back and looking at the broader spectrum of scientific discovery can we ever really hope to understand the importance of the LHC it's perfectly conceivable that most of these significant findings won't even have a major impacts in our lifetime it could take us 50 a hundred or even 200 years to fully understand and use what is being found underground near Geneva we are not colliding protons for our own benefit but rather with the hope that these small discoveries that we might not fully understand now may help future generations with their own extraordinary discoveries so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up below don't forget to subscribe also as always if you've got a suggestion for mega-projects you know what to do leave it in the comments below up vote the ones you like because that's where I find a lot of ideas for these videos so if you did that it would be great so why are you down there smash that like button and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 550,952

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Id: 2K7hKscXPys

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020