LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light (186,282 miles/sec)before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to ‑271.3°C – a temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.
Now this will be a bit hard to swallow, once the the LHC gets up and running spinning those atom around at the speed of light they produce a little heat yes with the aid of what’s called the ALICE component the ALICE - A Large Ion Collide Experiment. ALICE detects quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter thought to have formed just after the Big Bang. It is designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma once they reach their correct speed and temperature, yeah all cool so far? At this point atoms are stripped on their electrons leaving only the Nucleus Collisions in the LHC generate extreme temperatures. For part of each year the LHC provides collisions between lead ions, recreating in the laboratory conditions similar to those just after the big bang. Under these extreme conditions, protons and neutrons "melt", freeing the quarks from their bonds with the gluons. This is quark-gluon plasma. The existence of such a phase and its properties are key issues in the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), for understanding the phenomenon of confinement, and for a physics problem called chiral-symmetry restoration. The ALICE collaboration uses the 10,000-tonne ALICE detector – 26 m long, 16 m high, and 16 m wide – to study quark-gluon plasma. The detector sits in a vast cavern 56 m below ground close to the village of St Genis-Pouilly in France, receiving beams from the LHC. This is the collision point, BAM, What has be termed the God Particle, producing Quark Ghon Plasma, Plasma is 4th state of Matter, Matter is makes up everything from chocolate cake to you, this is what we refer to as The Big Bang the beginning of universal existence, Know to as The Higgs Boson. Any way fuck all that I’m story relates to the temperature as it collides?? Guess ya ready ? 9.9 Trillion Degrees Fahrenheit, yes 9.9 Trillion That’s 100,000 times hotter then the sun, and possibly at that point the hottest point in the universe. 9.9 fuk me
The vast majority of experiments at CERN happen ‘in flight’. Particles are accelerated to very high energies and are either smashed into fixed targets or two beams of particles are counter rotating and made to smash into each other head on in collider accelerators. In both cases there are detectors built around the point where the particle collisions take place and the debris of the collisions is measured. Since the colliding particles happen at 99% of light speed, the events of the collisions are extremely short. CERN has built a heavy ion linear accelerator that can accelerate lead ions that can be injected into the accelerator chain and subsequently transferred to LHC. So instead of smashing single protons, they can collide lead ions head on and because these ions have heavy nuclea full of protons and neutrons, the collisions creates a plasma. Even though the temperature within the plasma is incredibly hot, the cross section is so small and the event so short that the energy dissipated is a fraction of a Joule. So the quark gluon plasma may be very hot but it is short lived and the energy released almost zero. So It’s created in a collosion, and flies apart instantly. The particles created from it are detected by surrounding equipment. While, for an instant, it may be the hottest thing in the universe at this particular times, it’s extremely very tiny indeed. By the time it has expanded to the detector it is just a shower of energetic particles.
