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Questions tagged [large-hadron-collider]

World's largest particle accelerator built by the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) near the Franco-Swiss frontier near Geneva, Switzerland. It is designed to collide beams of protons with a centre of mass energy of up to 14 TeV. It contains the important detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.

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What if the LHC doesn't see SUSY?

A question in four parts. What are the main problems which supersymmetry purports to solve? What would constitute lack of evidence for SUSY at the proposed LHC energy scales (e.g. certain predicted ...
Nigel Seel's user avatar
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7 votes
1 answer
537 views

LHC Big Bang Temperatures

It's been claimed that the LHC's 14 TeV energy produces temperatures comparable to that which occurred very soon after the Big Bang. The well-known $E=1.5kT$ formula from classical statistical ...
Michael Luciuk's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
617 views

With estimates of mass constraints on magnetic monopoles, how likely is one to be found by the LHC (MoEDAL)?

Fermilab seems to have ruled out monopoles with mass less than 850 GeV, but I have seen some estimates of the mass thought to be in the order of up to $10^{18}$ GeV, which, of course, would make them ...
Gordon 's user avatar
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6 votes
2 answers
1k views

Will negatively charged strangelets be produced by the LHC?

Witten (and earlier, Bodner) hypothesized that strange matter (up, down, strange quarks) should be more stable than "regular" nuclear matter(The strange matter hypothesis). That is that the typical ...
Gordon 's user avatar
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9 votes
2 answers
1k views

ATLAS and CMS calorimeters

I was reading this interesting recent review on arXiv about particle identification: "Particle Identification" by Christian Lippmann (2011), arXiv:1101.3276 In figure 2, there is an ...
Rafael's user avatar
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18 votes
7 answers
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What would happen if you put your hand in front of the 7 TeV beam at LHC?

Some speculation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMqPT6oKJ8 Is there a possibility it would pass 'undetected' through your hand, or is it certain death? Can you conclude it to be vital, or ...
TROLLHUNTER's user avatar
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7 votes
1 answer
506 views

Unusual particle effects at CERN

In 2010 there were press reports that CERN had identified unusual properties in particle behavour in collisions. One link here. Here is a partial quote: "In some sense, it's like the particles talk ...
Roy Simpson's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
385 views

What is jet quenching and how far can the hydrodynamic analogy go?

I recently heard about jet quenching concerning data taken by the experiments at the LHC. Apparently it is related to the existence to the quark-gluon plasma. As far as I understood this ...
Cedric H.'s user avatar
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7 votes
2 answers
421 views

How relevant is LHC to quantum gravity?

Premise: the LHC is obviously mapping unseen territory in high energies, and therefore it's always possible to imagine far out results. Excluding completely unexpected outcomes - is the LHC ...
Sklivvz's user avatar
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6 votes
2 answers
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Advantages of high-energy heavy-ion collisions over proton-proton collisions?

Some high-energy experiments (RHIC, LHC) use ion-ion collisions instead of proton-proton collisions. Although the total center-of-mass energy is indeed higher than p-p collisions, it might happen that ...
jbatista's user avatar
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3 votes
3 answers
792 views

What does it mean a temperature of billions of degrees?

I read a few days ago that in the LHC temperatures of billions of degrees were achieved. I'm curious to know what does it really mean such a temperature? The concept of temperature is easy to grasp ...
Albert's user avatar
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7 votes
3 answers
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Particle colliders: why do they need an accelerator chain

Particle colliders like the LHC or the Tevatron use a complex accelerator chain to have particles at a given energy before being accelerated. For example: The CERN accelerator complex to inject in ...
Cedric H.'s user avatar
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18 votes
2 answers
1k views

If the LHC doesn't find the Higgs Boson, what would be the implications for the Standard Model?

What would be the implications to the Standard Model if the Higgs Boson hadn't been found with the LHC? Also, if the Higgs Boson had not been found with the LHC, would it have been successfully ...
pablasso's user avatar
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11 votes
4 answers
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Why is the LHC circular and 27km long?

The LHC in Geneva is a circular accelerator, 27 km long - why is it like that ?
Cedric H.'s user avatar
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