What is Large Hadron Collider (LHC)- UPSC Current Affairs

Context

The Large Hadron Collider started working again after a gap. An LHC experiment, ‘The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment’, has observed three never-before-seen particles.

Probable Question

Write a brief note on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its LHCb Experiment.

What is LHC?

• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator built by CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research.
• It is a giant, complex machine built to study particles that are the smallest known building blocks of all things.
• Structurally, it is a 27-km-long track-loop buried 100meters underground on the Swiss-French border.
• In its operational state, it fires two beams of protons almost at the speed of light in opposite directions inside a ring of superconducting electromagnets.
• The magnetic field created by the superconducting electromagnets keeps the protons in a tight beam and guides them along the way as they travel through beam pipes and finally collide.
• The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two needles 10 km apart with such precision that they meet halfway.
• Since the LHC’s powerful electromagnets carry almost as much current as a bolt of lightning, they must be kept chilled.
• The LHC uses a distribution system of liquid helium to keep its critical components ultracold at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, which is colder than interstellar space.

About Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Experiment

• The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment specializes in investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the "beauty quark", or "b quark".
• An abundance of different quark types are created by the LHC before they decay quickly into other forms.
• To catch the b quarks, LHCb has developed sophisticated movable tracking detectors close to the path of the beams circling in the LHC.
• The LHCb experiment is situated at one of the four points around CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where beams of protons are smashed together, producing an array of different particles.

How does it Work?

• The aim of the LHCb experiment is to record the decay of particles containing b and anti-b quarks, collectively known as ‘B mesons’.
• The experiment’s 4,500 tonne detector is specifically designed to filter out these particles and the products of their decay.
• Rather than flying out in all directions, B mesons formed by the colliding proton beams (and the particles they decay into) stay close to the line of the beam pipe, and this is reflected in the design of the detector.
• Other LHC experiments surround the entire collision point with layers of sub-detectors, like an onion.
• But the LHCb detector stretches for 20 meters along the beam pipe, with its sub-detectors stacked behind each other like books on a shelf.

About Quarks

• Quarks are elementary particles that come in six “flavors”: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
• They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei.
• But they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, called tetraquarks and pentaquarks.
• These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists about six decades ago around the same time as conventional hadrons but they have been observed by LHCb and other experiments only in the past 20 years.

New Findings

• The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment has observed three never-before-seen particles; a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”.
• Pentaquark was observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons.
• The second kind is a doubly electrically charged tetraquark.
• It is an open-charm tetraquark composed of a charm quark, a strange antiquark, and an up quark and a down antiquark.
• It was spotted together with its neutral counterpart in a joint analysis of decays of positively charged and neutral B mesons.

Previous Runs and ‘God Particle’ Discovery

• Ten years ago, scientists at CERN had announced to the world the discovery of the Higgs boson or the ‘God Particle’ during the LHC’s first run.
• The discovery concluded the decades-long quest for the ‘force-carrying’ subatomic particle, and proved the existence of the Higgs mechanism, a theory put forth in the mid-sixties.
• The Higgs boson and its related energy field are believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe.
• The LHC’s second run (Run 2) began in 2015 and lasted till 2018. The second season of data taking produced five times more data than Run 1.
• After three years of maintenance and upgradation, LHC started working again and now it will operate round-the-clock for four years at unprecedented energy levels of 13 tera electron volts.
• The third run will see 20 times more collisions as compared to Run 1.

Upgrade your UPSC CSE 2023 preparation with this detailed video lecture on Space Research by Sharad Tripathi Sir, our Science and Technology faculty:

Download the PrepLadder app to study from India’s top UPSC faculty and transform your UPSC preparation from the Beginner level to the Advanced level.

You can also join our Telegram channel for UPSC coaching and to stay updated with the latest information about the UPSC exam.

Own Your Dream

Team PrepLadder