LARGE HADRON COLLIDER at CERN

What is CERN?
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)  is  is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border.CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research.
Also, CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. 


These days, Most of the activities at CERN are directed towards operating the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the experiments related to it.


What is the LHC?


LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider which smashes two beams of particles head-on at super-fast speeds, recreating the conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.It is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator built by CERN with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theory of particle physics and high-energy physics, and particularly that of the existence of the Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry
( supersymmetry is a hypothesized theory which suggests that for every type of boson*  there exists a corresponding type of fermion*  with the same mass and internal quantum numbers, and vice-versa.)


*bosons- they are the particles governed by Bose-Einstein statistics.Also, large no. of bosons can occupy the same quantum states.
*fermions-they are the group of sub-atomic particles governed by Fermi–Dirac statistics. Two or more fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state (following the Pauli's exclusion principle).

LHC  contains six detectors each designed for specific kinds of exploration.

seven experiments perfomed on LHC

LHC experiments
ATLAS-    A Toroidal LHC Apparatus  (the one that searches for the evidence of supersymmetry)
CMS-        Compact Muon Solenoid      ( the one that searches for the Higgs Boson )
LHCb-       LHC-beauty
ALICE-     A Large Ion Collider Experiment
TOTEM-   Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation
LHCf-        LHC-forward
MoEDAL- Monopole and Exotics Detector At the LHC



On 10 September 2008, the proton beams were successfully circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time, but 9 days later operations were halted due to a magnet quench incident resulting from an electrical fault. The ensuing helium gas explosion damaged over 50 superconducting magnets and their mountings, and contaminated the vacuum pipe. On 20 November 2009 proton beams were successfully circulated again, with the first recorded proton–proton collisions occurring 3 days later at the injection energy of 450 GeV per beam.On 30 March 2010, the first collisions took place between two 3.5 TeV beams, setting the current world record for the highest-energy man-made particle collisions, and the LHC began its planned research program.The LHC will operate at 4 TeV per beam until the end of 2012, 0.5 TeV higher than in 2010 and 2011. It will then go into shutdown for 20 months for upgrades to allow full energy operation (7 TeV per beam), with reopening planned for late 2014.