The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC ) is an accelerator at CERN which will bring protons into head-on collision at higher energies (14 TeV) than ever achieved before to allow scientists to penetrate still further into the structure of matter and recreate the conditions prevailing in the Universe just 10**-12 seconds after the "Big Bang" when the temperature was 10**16 degrees.

The LHC will be built at CERN astride the Franco-Swiss border west of Geneva at the foot of the Jura mountains. The LHC will be fed with protons from the existing complex of CERN accelerators. It will sit in the same tunnel as the existing LEP accelerator, in which electrons and positrons (antiparticle of the electron) are brought in to head-on collision.

ATLAS | CMS Experiments