A third experiment optimized for the forward direction is Total Elastic and diffractive cross-section Measurement (TOTEM), located near the CMS interaction point, which focuses on the physics of the high-energy protons themselves. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) pictured here can capture images of particles up to 40 million times per second. (Image credit: xenotar via Getty Images) And, occasionally, that inconvenient bit of matter is the Earth. We call these intergalactic bullets — mostly high-energy protons — "cosmic rays." Cosmic rays carry a range of energies, from the almost negligible, to energies that absolutely dwarf those of the LHC. Many of the LHC's most important experiments, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, utilize the general-purpose detectors ATLAS and CMS. But it also has several other more specialized detectors that can be used in specific types of experiments.

Further, we can expand the number of cosmic targets to include neutron stars, which consist of matter so dense that whatever potentially dangerous thing we might consider will stop dead in the neutron star right after it is made. And yet the sun and the neutron stars we see in the universe all are still there. They haven't disappeared. Safety assured! In their conceptual design report, CERN listed three possible avenues for their Future Circular Collider to take, each providing a different set of advantages and disadvantages in science, engineering and cost. The first is the construction of an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) 100 km around that will provide high-precision studies of the Higgs boson and other known particles. The second would upgrade the FCC-ee into a new hadron collider (FCC-hh) with an energy seven times that of the LHC. This design could include a hadron-lepton interaction point (FCC-he). And finally, perhaps at the bottom of the wish list, is an upgrade to the LHC (HE-LHC) that will double its current power to 27,000 GeV. Sharing the same underground cavern as LHCb is a smaller instrument called MoEDAL, which stands for "Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC". While most CERN experiments are designed to study known particles, this one is aimed at discovering hitherto unknown ones that lie outside the present Standard Model. A monopole, for example, would be a magnetized particle consisting only of a north pole without a south one, or vice versa. Such particles have long been hypothesized, but never observed. The purpose of MoEDAL is to look out for any monopoles that might be created in collisions inside the LHC. It could also potentially detect certain "stable massive particles" that are predicted by theories beyond the Standard Model. If it's successful in finding any of these particles, MoEDAL could help to resolve fundamental questions such as the existence of other dimensions or the nature of dark matter. Climate scienceWhile physicists know they cannot know the results without building the instruments and doing the experiment, the economics of such exploration is more open to debate. What kind of price are we willing to pay for a better understanding of our universe? Cutting-edge science is an exploration of the unknown; an intellectual step into the frontier of human knowledge. Such studies provide great excitement for those of us passionate about understanding the world around us, but some are apprehensive of the unknown and wonder if new and powerful science, and the facilities where it is explored, could be dangerous. Some even go so far as to ask whether one of humanity's most ambitious research projects could even pose an existential threat to the Earth itself. So let's ask that question now and get it out of the way. Can a supercollider end life on Earth? No. Of course not. I started on ATLAS for my PhD research. I was developing new pixel sensors to improve the measurement of particles as they pass through our detector. It's really important to make them resistant to radiation damage, which is a big concern when you put the sensors close to the particle collisions. Since then, I've had the opportunity to work on a number of different projects, such as understanding how the Higgs boson and the top quark interact with each other. Now I'm applying machine learning algorithms to our data to look for hints of dark matter. One of the biggest mysteries in physics right now is, what is 85% of the matter in our universe? We call it dark matter, but we don't actually know much about it! To increase the energy of the proton beams to such an extreme level, "the thousands of superconducting magnets, whose fields direct the beams around their trajectory, need to grow accustomed to much stronger currents after a long period of inactivity during LS2," the same CERN statement read. Getting the equipment up to speed in this upgrade is a process that CERN calls "magnet training" and which is made up of about 12,000 individual tests. Skeptics have proposed that the LHC would produce many possible dangers, ranging from the vague fear of the unknown to some that are strangely specific.

The LHC is sometimes referred to as “high energy” physics but it’s only high energy on a subatomic level. (Image credit: mesut zengin via Getty Images) LHC Safety Assessment Group " Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions Addendum on strangelets". June 2008. However, the price of exploring the unknown often doesn’t come cheap. With at least a 10-figure price tag, scientists and engineers are debating whether the endeavor will be worth the investment. The goodAll of those phenomena, as well as many others, cause subatomic particles to be flung across space. Mostly consisting of protons, those particles travel the lengths of the universe, stopping only when an inconvenient bit of matter gets in their way. Tian Yu Cao, a philosopher of science and politics from Boston University, is pessimistic about the future of China's Circular Electron Positron Collider, or CEPC. He pointed to China’s last Five-Year Plan published in 2016, which did not mention the CEPC among the 10 flagship projects announced in the report.

Particles are smashed together with such enormous energies that the collisions create a cascade of new particles — most of them extremely short-lived. The important thing for scientists is to work out what all these particles are, and that's not an easy task. As the name suggests, Run 3 is the third science run of the LHC and will begin on July 5, 2022. It will build on LHC's discoveries made during its Run 1 (2009-2013) and Run 2 (2015 to 2018) and perform experiments through 2024.What makes this colander and pour bowl set my favorite, as well as Rosner’s, is a combination of clever design; ease of use; and bright, fun color options that are a pleasure to have on the counter. I switched out my metal colander for this combo because I felt that the metal retained heat for too long, meaning I would frequently burn myself when I went to grab some strained beans or pasta. This set solves that problem and offers a solution if your sink is full of dishes: You can simply strain the liquid into the bowl beneath and worry about it later. It also means that this is an effective tool for both straining and draining.

Scientists are still trying to figure out why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. (Image credit: sakkmesterke via Getty Images) Two of the four collision points around the circumference of the LHC are occupied by large general-purpose detectors. These include the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which can be thought of as a giant 3D camera, snapping images of particles up to 40 million times per second. Right now, nobody can say for sure how much more power we will need to find the next new particles -- if there are any. It is entirely possible that the next collider may not see them at all. The ugly Mind you, there is zero evidence that strangelets are anything other than an idea born in the fertile imagination of a theoretical physicist. But, if they exist, the claim is that a strangelet is essentially a catalyst. If it impacts ordinary matter, it will make the matter it touches also turn into a strangelet. Following the idea to its logical conclusion, if a strangelet were made on Earth, it would result in the entire planet collapsing down into a ball of matter made of strangelets … kind of like turning the Earth into an exotic version of neutron star. Essentially a strangelet can be thought of as a subatomic zombie; one that turns everything it touches into a fellow strangelet zombie. Cosmic rays hit the Earth, the sun, other stars and all the myriad denizens of the universe with energies that far exceed those of the LHC. This happens all the time. If there were any danger, we would see some of these objects disappearing before our eyes. And yet we don't. Thus, we can conclude that whatever happens in the LHC, it poses exactly, precisely, inarguably, zero danger. And you can't forget the crucial point that this argument works for all conceivable dangers, including those that nobody has imagined yet.

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Away from the LHC, there are other facilities at CERN that are doing equally important research. Linking particle physics to climate science may not be an obvious step, yet that's what one experiment is doing at CERN's Proton Synchrotron. This is a smaller and less sophisticated accelerator than the LHC, but it's still capable of doing useful work. Away from ATLAS and CMS, the LHC has two other interaction points. One is occupied by A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), a specialized detector for heavy-ion physics. The final interaction point is home to two experiments on the very cutting edge of physics: LHCb, devoted to the physics of the exotic 'beauty quark', and MoEDAL — the Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC. LHC and the Higgs boson To give a sense of scale, the LHC collides particles together with a total energy of 13 trillion (or tera) electron volts of energy (TeV). The highest-energy cosmic ray ever recorded was an unfathomable 300,000,000 TeV of energy. With LHC's magnets "trained" and the proton beams more powerful than ever, the LHC will be able to create collisions at higher energies than ever before, expanding the possibilities for what scientists using the upgraded equipment might find.