Particle Accelerators

High-Energy Accelerators

Particle accelerators are of special interest to anybody engaged in science communication because they form a microcosm in which can be seen the interdependent relations between science and politics, science and citizens, science across national boundaries, and the interdependence between science and technology. The clearest examples of this are the high-energy particle accelerators. High-energy accelerators operate on budgets in the millions, and each one employs thousands of researchers. Most are built as underground systems of tunnels, outwardly invisible except at their main entry facilities and periodic servicing stations that give access for repairing the magnets and cryogenics that channel the particles. There are five high-energy accelerators currently operating in the world. A sixth high-energy accelerator, the so-called Superconducting Super Collider, was begun during the 1990s and later abandoned before completion.

As of the generation of its first test beams in September 2009, the world's highest-energy accelerator became the new beamline Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research). The LHC will accelerate protons in rings going in opposite directions until colliding them in front of an array of detectors at energies of 14 tera-electron-volts (TeV). [Page 565]The initial goal of the LHC is to collect data on the existence and characteristics of the Higgs boson, which has sometimes been referred to as the “God Particle” (following the title of a book by Leon Lederman). The Higgs boson is thought to be the key to a grand unified theory, a theory that would be able to explain the four fundamental forces of the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagne-tism, and gravity. The Higgs boson is thought to give particles mass and, in this sense, is also critical to understanding why, after the Big Bang, the universe consisted almost exclusively of matter rather than antimatter, in violation of symmetry predictions. Construction of the LHC beamline and detectors began in 1995, and has been delayed due to problems with the superconducting magnets and cost overruns that have tripled the original estimated cost.

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