
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the most fascinating places on Earth. Located in a Northwestern suburb of Geneva, on the France-Switzerland border, CERN operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. It consists of 23 member states and is home to half of the world's particle scientists. CERN is responsible for many groundbreaking discoveries, such as the Higgs boson particle, also known as the "God particle," which is responsible for giving all particles their mass.
One of CERN's most significant achievements is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest energy particle collider. The creation of the LHC was a revolutionary project that took over two decades to complete. Over 10,000 scientists, hundreds of institutes, and 100 countries came together to build this instrument, which cost over 7.5 billion euros. The LHC lies inside a 27-kilometer tunnel in the shape of a ring that consists of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles.
The LHC works by firing two beams of particles, especially protons, along two paths. One particle goes clockwise, and the other goes counterclockwise. These beams are accelerated to a speed closer to the speed of light and, when they reach their maximum speed, are targeted towards each other to collide. When these two particles collide inside the LHC, they break apart into smaller particles, including quarks and gluons. Quarks are sub-atomic particles and are very unstable and can decay in a fraction of a second, whereas gluons are the mitigating force. This entire collision is detected by the detectors inside the collider, which collect and send the data to a grid of computer systems.
The first-ever collision inside the Hadron Collider was achieved in 2010, two years after the development of the collider. The particles collided at a combined energy of seven Tera electron volts, which was almost four times higher than the previous record. Further upgrades were made to the collider, and it is now capable of producing a combined energy of 13 Tera electron volts. Several upgrades were done back and forth to the collider until 2018, when it was shut down for over two years. The collider was restarted in 2021 after certain upgrades and maintenance and this time with the maximum beam energy of 6.8 Tera electron volts per beam. This round is said to last until 2025.
Over the years, the Large Hadron Collider has managed to reveal some big mysteries like the Higgs boson particle, which was just a theory before the 2012 collision. After numerous experiments, researchers couldn't discover it. After several upgrades to the LHC, the Higgs boson was finally discovered in July 2012. But CERN's most recent discovery could potentially change everything we know about the universe.
On July 7th, 2022, a mysterious crack appeared inside the magnetic field of the Earth during the Large Hadron Collider project. This crack allowed solar winds to stream through the openings, causing strong geomagnetic storms and a mesmerizing sight to behold. According to researchers, this happened because of a unique phenomenon called coronal interaction region from the Sun. These are areas of space where the Sun's magnetic field is connected to interplanetary magnetic fields. This discovery has huge implications for space weather, which affects everything from satellites to GPS navigation.
In conclusion, CERN and the Large Hadron Collider have revolutionized the field of particle physics and have made many groundbreaking discoveries. They have revealed mysteries like the Higgs boson particle and contributed to our understanding of the universe. With the recent discovery of the mysterious crack in the magnetic field of the Earth, CERN.



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