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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, running for 27km in a circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border. It takes protons up to almost the speed of light and smashes them together in head-on collisions inside four enormous detectors named ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb. The collision debris can contain a whole host of rare and unstable particles that these detectors then record using multiple subsystems, and physicists can use the data gathered to learn more about the fundamental building blocks of our Universe.

ATLAS and CMS are the general-purpose particle detectors where the famous Higgs Boson was discovered. The two detectors are used to study known particles in greater detail than ever before, but also in searches for new particles and phenomena including supersymmetry and extra dimensions. LHCb was specially designed to investigate the subtle differences between matter and antimatter by studying the behaviour of particles containing "beauty" quarks, in an effort to understand why the Universe now contains only matter. Finally, the ALICE detector is used to study an exotic state of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma that existed when the Universe was around a millionth of a second old. By colliding lead nuclei accelerated to almost the speed of light, the LHC can recreate droplets of this primordial state of matter...


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