• Question: where you involved with th particle accelerator in switzerland

    Asked by sugawaffel98 to Hitesh, Hywel, Mae, Nik, Tiffany on 8 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Hitesh Dave

      Hitesh Dave answered on 8 Jun 2012:

      I was involved during trekking in switzerland in 2009….but not with particle accelerator..lol.:-)..sorry I am not the best person to answer this question…

    • Photo: Tiffany Taylor

      Tiffany Taylor answered on 10 Jun 2012:

      Nope. I am not a physicist. But I did watch a live skype conversation with some of the people who work there. They do some pretty cool stuff!

    • Photo: Mae Woods

      Mae Woods answered on 11 Jun 2012:

      No. It sounds interesting though

    • Photo: Hywel Owen

      Hywel Owen answered on 11 Jun 2012:

      Yes, our group at Manchester does quite a lot of work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. CERN is just west of Geneva on the edge of Switzerland.

      There are thousands of people working on the LHC, but they’re more or less divided into people who designed and and now running the particle accelerator, and those who designed and built the particle detectors and are now using them for experiments. Quite a few University researchers (including in our group) are contributing in various ways in both of these areas. I have a PhD student who is looking at how to carefully catch the thin halo of particles that follows the main beams around the accelerator, so that they don’t strike the superconducting magnets and damage them. Also, my colleague’s PhD student is looking at how to add a new accelerator on top of the present one. The present LHC collides protons going one way round the 27km ring with protons going the other way round, so it’s really two accelerators in one. Protons are a kind of hadron, which is where the name LHC comes from. The new accelerator will allow electrons to be directed onto one of the proton beams, which make different sets of subatomic particles and gives different useful information.

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