Question: what is the point in smashing particles together?

Clara Nellist answered on 13 Mar 2014:

Great question, @dgfhk5789!

The particles that we want to study in our experiments, like the Higgs boson, have to be made from scratch and this takes a lot of raw energy, Do you know Einstein’s famous equation that E=mc^2 (where here ^2 means ‘squared’)? This means that you can get energy (E) from particles (m), which in our case comes from the protons we smash together at the Large Hadron Collider. The c^2 just tells us that you get a lot of energy from a little particle because c is the speed of light which is a really big number! This energy then turns into lots of new particles and some of them are the ones we want to study.

But we need a lot of energy to make these particles, so the protons also need to be going very, very fast! The speed we make them go at is 99.999999% the speed of light, where the speed of light is around 186,000 miles per second! That’s pretty fast, right?! To do this we use a 17 miles long particle accelerator (the Large Hadron Collider) that is in the shape of a circle. It’s this shape so that every time the protons go round the circle, they get pushed a little faster. One bunch goes one way (clockwise) and the other bunch goes the other way (anti-clockwise) and when they’re going fast enough we smash them together making the new particles out of all the energy! 🙂