Description
In a few months from now the largest ever built particle accelerator, the
Large Hadron Collider LHC will be put into operation at the European Centre
for Particle Physics CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Protons will collide with
7x higher energies and with 100x more intensities as at the present largest
collider. Development, construction and commissioning of more than 20 km
superconducting magnets with over 8 T magnetic field and controlling the
stored beam energy is a major challenge.
Two large multi-purpose particle detectors, ATLAS and CMS, and 2 dedicated
detectors, ALICE and LHCb, will record any collision products. The
combination of fast and precise detectors together with robustness and
radiation hardness is essential. The enormous raw data volume of 70
TeraBytes/s needs to be reduced by a factor 200'000 using efficient trigger
mechanisms. The LHC data volume to be permanently stored is still about 15
PetaBytes per year.
Beside hope for discovery of the long searched Higgs particle there are
prospects to find physics beyond the Standard Model. If Supersymmetry
exists, the lightest supersymmetric particle, if stable, is a good candidate
for dark matter in the universe. LHC might also be able to discover extra
dimensions and to produce microscopic black holes which would evaporate
immediately due to Hawking radiation.
The present status of the LHC commissioning and possible start-up scenarios will
also be presented.