Where is it?

CERN’s research centres are spread across a number of sites in France and Switzerland. Its flagship site is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, a gigantic particle accelerator which spans the Swiss-French border at a depth of 100 metres underground. The main component of the LHC is a 27 km ring of superconducting magnets, each chilled to—271°C, around which trillions of charged subatomic particles—either lead ions or hadrons (bundles of quarks)—are accelerated in opposite directions in a near-perfect vacuum. When they have reached 99.99999999% of the speed of light the particles are collided, generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core and recreating the conditions in the thousandths of a nanosecond following the Big Bang.

There are 10,000 scientists and engineers from 100 different countries working on the LHC, and six separate experiment teams analysing the data from these collisions, each of them focusing on different particles with their own set of specialised equipment. The LHC took 13 years to build and cost around ?4.5 billion, and was officially switched on on 10 September 2008, sending its first particle beams successfully around the circuit. Unfortunately, an electrical fault only nine days later caused a helium leak and damage to some of the magnets, requiring lengthy repairs and delaying the atom-busting action until mid-2009.

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