Director Visits the Large Hadron Collider
05 October 2009
Professor Neville Greaves, who has recently been appointed to the Science Board of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, has just visited CERN – the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco– Swiss border near Geneva where the famous Large Hadron Collider or LHC is located 100m underground. STFC’s Science Board toured the massive detector arrays at the intersection points around the 27km synchrotron ring, including ATLAS pictured here. These three dimensional arrays detect the complex showers of particles generated when beams of protons and antiprotons travelling close to the speed of light collide head on, mimicking the colossal energies present just after the Big Bang. One of the major objectives of the LHC is to establish the existence of the Higgs Boson – the particle which is believed will explain the origin of mass. The UK is a major contributor (15%) to the annual cost of 650million euros to operate CERN. During the visit members of STFC Science Board met senior science and engineering directors from CERN to discuss UK involvement and also spoke with John Nichols, the British Ambassador to Switzerland. After the visit Professor Neville Greaves said, "The fundamental science that the LHC will uncover is amazing but so is the cost. Gone are the days when the Welsh physicist EJ Williams discovered the elusive pi meson in Aberystwyth from a serendipitous shower of cosmic rays on a photographic plate. There is no doubt that global organisation and scientific collaboration is now the only way forward to share the huge cost and techno-scientific expertise needed. The CERN enterprise also invented the world wide web and is a major training ground for many of our future scientists and engineers, so it doesn’t just produce science". Aberystwyth undergraduate physicists are visiting CERN this summer to see for themselves the "largest machine in the world".
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