Back to the Big Bang: the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been described as the world's largest scientific experiment, and physicists and engineers from all over the world have invested years of effort in designing and constructing it. Yet, despite its size, the LHC has been built to study the very smallest components of the universe. Although we know a lot about these fundamental building blocks of nature from previous experiments, we've realised that we need to discover and understand far more. The first speaker describes some of the outstanding mysteries and open questions in particle physics, which the LHC has been designed to help investigate. Three of the most pressing questions being the question of mass and our search for the Higgs boson the problem of antimatter the search for dark matter. The hope is that data from the LHC will shed light on at least some of these mysteries, and this speaker looks at the plan to analyse this data and understand more of the universe. She describes the experiments which detect the outcome of the beam collisions, and also the intention to manipulate and make sense of the huge volumes of data that will be recorded. The second speaker describes some of the technical innovations and challenges in the LHC design and construction.