Towards higher energies with the LHC

26 November 1997

Towards higher energies with the LHC Display the high resolution version

Seventy years ago, at a meeting of the Royal Society on November 30th, 1927, Sir Ernest Rutherford said that it had long been his ambition to have "a copious supply of atoms and electrons [with] an energy far transcending that of the alpha and beta particles from radioactive bodies"*. By 2005, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) will reach a million times the energy of the most energetic alpha particles. The new machine will be built in the 27-km tunnel which currently houses the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), and will accelerate and collide protons. The particles will be guided round the ring by powerful superconducting magnets, shown here in this mock-up of the LHC in the LEP tunnel. The magnets will provide fields that in 1927, according to Rutherford, could be produced only "over a volume [as small as] a pin's head".

(*see Nature, vol 120, p 809, 3 December 1927)

Credit: CERN Photo

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