scholarly journals The Large Hadron Collider project: organizational and financial matters (of physics at the terascale)

Author(s):  
Jos Engelen

In this paper, I present a view of organizational and financial matters relevant for the successful construction and operation of the experimental set-ups at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. Construction of these experiments was particularly challenging: new detector technologies had to be developed; experimental set-ups that are larger and more complex than ever before had to be constructed; and larger collaborations than ever before had to be organized. Fundamental to the success were: the ‘reference’ provided by CERN, peer review, signed memoranda of understanding, well-organized resources review boards as an interface to the national funding agencies and collegial, but solidly organized, experimental collaborations.

2018 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 429-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Boveia ◽  
Caterina Doglioni

Colliders, among the most successful tools of particle physics, have revealed much about matter. This review describes how colliders contribute to the search for particle dark matter, focusing on the highest-energy collider currently in operation, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. In the absence of hints about the character of interactions between dark matter and standard matter, this review emphasizes what could be observed in the near future, presents the main experimental challenges, and discusses how collider searches fit into the broader field of dark matter searches. Finally, it highlights a few areas to watch for the future LHC program.


Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 700
Author(s):  
Marina Prvan ◽  
Arijana Burazin Mišura ◽  
Zoltan Gecse ◽  
Julije Ožegović

This paper deals with a problem the packing polyhex clusters in a regular hexagonal container. It is a common problem in many applications with various cluster shapes used, but symmetric polyhex is the most useful in engineering due to its geometrical properties. Hence, we concentrate on mathematical modeling in such an application, where using the “bee” tetrahex is chosen for the new Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) design upgrade, which is one of four detectors used in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). We start from the existing hexagonal containers with hexagonal cells packed inside, and uniform clustering applied. We compare the center-aligned (CA) and vertex-aligned (VA) models, analyzing cluster rotations providing the increased packing efficiency. We formally describe the geometrical properties of clustering approaches and show that cluster sharing is inevitable at the container border with uniform clustering. In addition, we propose a new vertex-aligned model decreasing the number of shared clusters in the uniform scenario, but with a smaller number of clusters contained inside the container. Also, we describe a non-uniform tetrahex cluster packing scheme in the proposed container model. With the proposed cluster packing solution, it is accomplished that all clusters are contained inside the container region. Since cluster-sharing is completely avoided at the container border, the maximal packing efficiency is obtained compared to the existing models.


Author(s):  
Chris Llewellyn Smith

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine and detectors are now working superbly. There are good reasons to hope and expect that the new domain that the LHC is already exploring, operating at 7 TeV with a luminosity of 10 33  cm −2  s −1 , or the much bigger domain that will be opened up as the luminosity increases to over 10 34 and the energy to 14 TeV, will provide clues that will usher in a new era in particle physics. The arguments that new phenomena will be found in the energy range that will be explored by the LHC have become stronger since they were first seriously analysed in 1984, although their essence has changed little. I will review the evolution of these arguments in a historical context, the development of the LHC project since 1984, and the outlook in the light of reports on the performance of the machine and detectors presented at this meeting.


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (18n19) ◽  
pp. 3286-3296 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZHI-ZHONG XING

I argue that TeV neutrino physics might become an exciting frontier of particle physics in the era of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The origin of non-zero but tiny masses of three known neutrinos is probably related to the existence of some heavy degrees of freedom, such as heavy Majorana neutrinos or heavy Higgs bosons, via a TeV-scale seesaw mechanism. I take a few examples to illustrate how to get a balance between theoretical naturalness and experimental testability of TeV seesaws. Besides possible collider signatures at the LHC, new and non-unitary CP-violating effects are also expected to show up in neutrino oscillations for type-I, type-(I+II) and type-III seesaws at the TeV scale.


2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Bonnal ◽  
Jurgen De Jonghe ◽  
John Ferguson

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is under construction at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, near Geneva, Switzerland. In 2003, a new earned value management (EVM) system was introduced to improve transparency in LHC project reporting, to allow a clearer distinction between cost differences to the baseline due to overruns versus resulting delays, and to provide the project management team with a more reactive project management information system for better decision-making. EVM has become a de facto standard for the follow-up of cost and schedule and several commercial packages are offered for implementing an EVM system. But because none of these packages fulfilled CERN's requirements, its executive management decided to proceed with an in-house development. In this paper, an overview of what CERN considers to be good requirements for an EVM system suited to large-scale projects is provided: the deliverable-oriented, collaborative and lean management dimensions are enforced. In conclusion, we discuss some of our positive and negative experiences so those who would like to develop or implement similar enterprise-wide project control systems can be more aware of common pitfalls.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alban Kellerbauer

Almost ten years after the first production of cold antimatter at CERN, the confinement of antihydrogen has recently been achieved for the first time. Several experiments installed at the Antiproton Decelerator intend to test the symmetry between matter and antimatter by means of trapped anti-atoms. In addition, in the coming years it is planned to study the effect of gravity on antiparticles for the first time. Meanwhile, evidence from the Large Hadron Collider hinting at a violation of charge–parity symmetry beyond the Standard Model of particle physics has yet to be confirmed. A violation of the discrete symmetries that describe the relation between matter and antimatter could explain the excess of ordinary matter in the Universe.


2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (04) ◽  
pp. 1430004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dezső Horváth

The 40 years old Standard Model, the theory of particle physics, seems to describe all experimental data very well. All of its elementary particles were identified and studied apart from the Higgs boson until 2012. For decades, many experiments were built and operated searching for it, and finally, the two main experiments of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, CMS and ATLAS, in 2012 observed a new particle with properties close to those predicted for the Higgs boson. In this paper, we outline the search story: the exclusion of the Higgs boson at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, and its observation at LHC.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Aleandro Nisati

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the highest energy machine for particle physics research ever built. In the years 2010–2012 this accelerator has collided protons to a centre-mass-energy up to 8 TeV (note that 1 TeV corresponds to the energy of about 1000 protons at rest; the mass of one proton is about 1.67×10–24 g). The events delivered by the LHC have been collected and analysed by four apparatuses placed alongside this machine. The search for the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model and the search for new particles and fields beyond this theory represent the most important points of the scientific programme of the LHC. In July 2012, the international collaborations ATLAS and CMS, consisting of more than 3000 physicists, announced the discovery of a new neutral particle with a mass of about 125 GeV, whose physics properties are compatible, within present experimental and theoretical uncertainties, to the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. This discovery represents a major milestone for particle physics, since it indicates that the hypothesized Higgs mechanism seems to be responsible for the masses of elementary particles, in particular W± and Z0 bosons, as well as fermions (leptons and quarks). The 2013 Physics Nobel Prize has been assigned to F. Englert and P. Higgs, ‘for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider’.


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