The Hadron Collider: what's it all about, then?
Around about now, boffins will be eagerly awaiting news that protons are finding their way fully around the 27km circuit of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the latest and best particle accelerator - and the biggest scientific experimental apparatus ever built.
This 10 September 2008 project milestone has captivated the mass media, despite the fact that the LHC began chilling-out back in August to allow its huge superconducting magnets to reach operating temperature. Full power operation testing is not scheduled until 2009. Yet it would be amiss for us not to join in the jollity, so we here bring you the executive summary, shorn of the hype, conflations, and bangs, to the state of play. The LHC comes at a crucial time for particle or quantum physics. In particular, it comes at a crucial time for the dominant theory, known as the Standard Model.
The Standard Model has been to modern particle physics rather like the periodic table was to 19th century chemistry. It served both to organize the known entities systematically, and as an impetus to fill in the holes in our knowledge. The Standard Model can claim to have predicted the existence of several previously unexpected particles, which were subsequently discovered experimentally. Arguably, too, it has also seeded the separate field of quantum information theory, and quantum computing.
