• Question: What is it like at the Hadron Collider, how big is it?

    Asked by to Thomas on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      It is BIG! The LHC has a length of 27 km at a depth of 100m underground! The tunnel itself is a normal size to walk & work around, and you can actually see the vessels that are placed around the tunnel in one of my photos (check the big blue pipe). It is more than a replica: it is a spare part from the LHC! (note: it is an empty one)

      The detectors, however, those are gianormous! ATLAS (where Clara works) is so big that they had to dig 30,000 tones of rocks to make room for it. It weighs as much as Eiffel tower and is comparable in size to Notre-Dame-de-Paris. At its center, it has a silicon pixel detector (like a camera) with 1 billion pixels, taking millions of shots per seconds (although only 202 are recording each second after a careful selection of the most interesting ones, called the triggering system).

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