Since 1999, Taiwan has helped fund the controversial Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe by pumping approximately NT$400 million (US$12.6 million) into the project, the National Science Council said yesterday.
The experiment, organized by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was designed to explore the interaction between basic particles in the universe, or what is known as the “standard model” in particle physics.
CERN is scheduled to circulate a beam through the entire LHC — located beneath the border between France and Switzerland — today at 3:30pm Taipei time. It plans to launch the first high-energy collision next month.
PHOTO: CHIEN JUNG-FONG, TAIPEI TIMES
Critics have said that the tremendous amount of energy released through the collision could create a black hole on the surface of the Earth.
The council said that over the past 10 years researchers from the Academia Sinica, National Central University and National Taiwan University (NTU) have joined scientists from around the world to work on two experiments related to the LHC project: A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and Compact Muon Solenoid.
Bob Hsiung (熊怡), an NTU physics professor and one of the key researchers involved in ATLAS, said the two experiments will help target the Higgs particle, which many believe is the key to solving long-standing questions about mass.
He said the particle detector for ATLAS is 46m long and 25m tall, while that for CMS is 21m by 16m. The former weighs 7,000 tonnes, whereas the latter weighs 12,500 tonnes.
Hsiung said the collider would be kept at a temperature of minus 270°C once it begins to operate. The particle collision will create a temperature 1 billion times higher than the heat from the center of the sun, he said.
The LHC’s detectors, once in operation, are expected to generate 15 petabytes, or 15,000,000GB of data, annually. A live broadcast of the beam circulation will be broadcast online at lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam.
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