• Question: How Large Is The Cern Super-Collider?

    Asked by 466prtb23 to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      The LHC is 27km in diameter. Plans for the new supercollider say it will be 100km in diameter – but I don’t know when/if plans will be finalised for it

    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Well, CERN has a series of accelerators. You have to understand that a single machine cannot accelerate protons from zero to the LHC maximum energy. What we do at CERN is to accelerate the protons in stages. First protons are produced from hydrogen by stripping out the electrons. These protons are accelerated in a linear accelerator which inject the protons in the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB), which accelerates the protons to 1.4 GeV, followed by the Proton Synchrotron (PS), which pushes the beam to 25 GeV. Protons are then sent to the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) where they are accelerated to 450 GeV. Once the protons reach this energy are moved to the LHC which will push their energy to 14 TeV.
      Each accelerator can also be used as a stand alone machine, so for example the SPS can also be used to send protons to other experiments situated in the North Area of CERN. So yes, the LHC is 27 km long, but the journey to get there has many more steps which increase the size and complexity of the CERN complex.

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