Large Hadron Collider Experiment-A scientific marvel

The never ending endeavor of man to know about the origin of the universe has lead to the formulation of many theories.Einstein with his theory of relativity gave a whole new perspective about time and space.Similarly Quantum mechanics was yet another breakthrough in understanding the universe.However for many years physicists were having trouble in unifying the two.There are a lot of missing pieces in the grand unification theory.With the data collected from the large hadron collider, scientists hope that they can fill in the last pieces of the jigsaw.

So what is the large hadron collider?Large hadron collider or LHC in short, is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world that can collide opposing particle beams like protons at 7 TeV/particle or lead ions at 574 TeV/ion.This collision generates a lot of subatomic particles which can then be detected.It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) after 24 years of planning.It is truly a machine of gigantic proportions.The total cost is over 3 billion euros and over 80,000 tons of construction material have been used.
Basically, LHC is built in a circular tunnel 26.7 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.The first beams were circulated successfully on September 10,2008 . Unfortunately on 19th September a fault developed on a small number of superconducting magnets. The repair will require a long technical intervention which overlaps with the planned winter shutdown. The LHC will, therefore, not see beam again before spring 2009.One of the most amazing feature of the LHC are the superconducting magnets.They can generate magnetic fields up to 180,000 times stronger than the earth.Further, it took 16 months to cool the 8000 magnets dispersed around the ring to their operational temperature of 1.9 Kelvin!
LHC accelerates particles to near light velocities and collides them head on.Protons inside the LHC despite their unimaginably small size will have kinetic energy equivalent to that of a 40 ton mass moving at 150 km/h.Physicists hope that one such collision might prove the existence of many particles which till now have been only theoretically surmised, the most famous of which is the Higgs-boson which is believed to assign mass to a high energy density region.It will also help us to understand the state of matter that prevailed after the Big Bang, the quark gluon plasma and many such things.Through some experiments scientists hope to generate small black holes inside the LHC(don't worry!Stephen Hawking proved that the smaller the black hole the faster it evaporates) or dark particles which are yet to be discovered on earth.

So how do they collect data from the collision?The particles generated from the collision follow distinctive trails as predicted by mathematical equations.They can be traced by giant detectors.These tracks are stored as raw digital data and later analyzed by over 5000 scientists who perform research for CERN at 300 locations spread over 50 countries.Depending on the intensity of the particle beams, millions of such collisions take place every second.Over 99 % of the data recorded will be discarded immediately.For every 10 million collisions only 2 or 3 will be worth observing.A total of 60,000 processors will be used to filter the data which are then stored on hard drives-this alone will amount to around 15 petabytes of data per year per detector.
There are mainly 4 detectors which track the particles generated namely ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb detectors.The compact muon solenoid spectrometer(CMS) particle detector, th