Open lecture by Samuel Silverstein

Organiser: Fysikum, Stockholm University
No registration required

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed—is designed to circulate intense beams of particles around its 27-kilometer ring at speeds approaching that of light. At four locations around the ring its two counter-rotating beams are brought into head-on collision, generating extraordinarily high energies that recreate conditions similar to those moments just after the Big Bang.

Enclosing each of these collision points are enormous particle detectors, composed of multiple layers of specialized sensors. These sensor layers record the cascades of particles produced in each collision, capturing detailed information about their trajectories, energies, and particle identities. By combining data from the different sensor layers, physicists build a three-dimensional picture of the event, allowing them to reconstruct what occurred at the collision point and to search for rare or unexpected phenomena that may reveal new insights into the fundamental particles and forces of nature.

This lecture offers a glimpse inside the LHC and its experiments, explains how the various detector layers operate, and illustrates how physicists analyze the resulting data to discover and measure new particles, including the Higgs boson.