The Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful atom smasher. It consists of a pair of intersecting rings inside a 16-mile-round tunnel on the CERN campus beneath the Swiss-French border near Geneva. The LHC takes protons (or entire atomic nuclei) from CERN’s other accelerators, adds even more energy using superconducting magnets and radio-frequency cavities, and smashes them into each other inside various building-sized detectors designed to observe the outcome of the collisions. Recently, scientists working on the LHC found some intriguing hints of a discrepancy between what the Standard Model predicts about a particle called the B0 meson and what actually occurred inside the experiment.
