Initiating Alice

Abstract

In a 27 km circular tunnel beneath the French and Swiss borders lies the largest experiment on Earth – CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Capable of spinning particles at close to the speed of light, it smashes them together in the bid to better understand the fundamental makeup of matter and ultimately answer the age old question. A magnificent feat of engineering, the LHC goes where no other machine has gone before. The magnets it uses to guide the particles’ trajectory are cooled to temperatures below those found in space. On the other hand, the collisions are over 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core. These collisions generate enough data per year to fill millions of hard drives. The cables needed to transfer that data could be wrapped around the Earth nearly seven times. CERN has changed everything.