Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): India celebrated the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is awarded to co-authors of publications based on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Run-2 data released recently, at the experimental collaborations ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

• About Large Hadron Collider: Operated by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), the it is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, enabling high-energy proton and heavy-ion collisions to explore the structure of matter at the smallest scales.

o It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures. It is located in Geneva, Switzerland.

• ATLAS: It explores a broad spectrum of physics topics, including the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that might constitute dark matter. Particle beams from the LHC collide at the center of the ATLAS detector, producing collision debris in the form of new particles that scatter in all directions from the collision point.
• CMS: This detector has an extensive physics program from studying the Standard Model (including Higgs boson) to searching for extra dimensions and potential dark matter particles.
• ALICE: This detector is dedicated to heavy-ion physics at the LHC. Its goal is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extremely high energy densities, where a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma is formed.
• LHCb: This experiment focuses on examining the subtle differences between matter and antimatter by studying particles known as “beauty quarks” or “b quarks.”