LHC: Cern in numbers
- The Guardian,
- Monday June 30 2008
- Article history
Visitors stand in front of the ATLAS detector. Photograph: Salvatore Di Nolfi/AP
· The Large Hadron Collider at Cern has been installed in a tunnel 27km in circumference, buried 100m underground.
· It will produce head-on collisions between two beams of particles travelling through a vacuum comparable to outer space.
· Each beam will consist of almost 3000 bunches of 100 billion particles each.
· At full power, each beam will be about as energetic as a car moving at 1600 kph.
· At near light speed, a proton in the LHC beam will make 11,245 laps a second.
· A beam might circulate for 10 hours, travelling more than 10 billion kilometres - far enough to get to the planet Neptune and back.
· 3000km of wires and fibres will carry information at the rate of 3200 terabytes per year, equivalent to around 3 billion books.
Posts
