CERN Large Hadron Collider

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), known as CERN, is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and most well-known for its LHC (Large Hadron Collider) particle accelerator.

Dad arranged this free tour a month in advance!










We were greeted nicely by the staff and Michell was the Physicist who guided us. The tour consisted of 1hr presentation and after that a visit to the Superconductor construction facility and ATLAS detector.

The presentation was very serious and talked about CERN history and technical matters like quarks, muons, particles etc. Dad and Eyang enjoyed it while Andrew and Ariel were ready to fall asleep!










What CERN do basically is to look for new particles which do not exist in nature anymore (after the Big Bang). To do this they need to accelerate and smash particles at near the speed of light. So they built this massive superconductor 'pipes' which are supercooled with liquid Helium (-273°C). The length? ... 30 kilometers! And it's 100m below the ground.

It cost the European countries 10 Billion Swiss Francs.










These ones are the accelerators which "speeds up" particles. They are simply huge and mind boggling.










Then we went to see the exhibition which are open for the public. Very nice 3D presentation and very futuristic. Basically CERN tried to explain on the way to find out how the universe exist.










The ATLAS is particle detector which is really huge. You can see a picture below. It is in operation so no one could come in due to the radiations. It's job basically is to detect newly-created particles which exist after the smashing of the protons.

Currently it is being tested at 3.5TeV (Terra Electron-Volts) and already detected new particles. When running in full capacity in a few years (7TeV) they will be able to produce tiny black-holes.