What fundamental physics exists at the attometer scale (a billionth the size of an atom, itself a billionth of a meter in size)?  Addressing this question requires enormous experiments, worldwide collaborations, and tens of thousands of physicists.  

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest machine and scientific experiment ever built, specifically designed to answer our questions of what happened when the universe was extremely small, almost immediately after the Big Bang.

Go on an insider’s tour of the LHC and through each step of the experiment:

• from the acceleration of bunches of billions of protons,
• to their collisions 40 million times a second at four interaction points along the 18 mile ring,
• to the detection of produced particles in detectors the size of a five-story building,
• to storing and analyzing the resulting exabytes of data.  

Along the way, we will walk across the CERN site, from neighboring vineyards, to a science experiment graveyard, to the very heart of CERN, where the most passionate scientific conversations take place: the cafeteria.  We will meet the Higgs boson, the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics discovered at the LHC in 2012, and see where scientists are searching to make the next discoveries.

Andrew Larkoski, Ph.D., is a theoretical particle physicist and Associate Editor for the journal Physical Review D.  His research is focused around the manifestation of the strong nuclear force in high-energy particle collider experiments, he has published more than 75 peer-reviewed articles, and written textbooks on particle physics and quantum mechanics.  Andrew was at CERN on July 4, 2012 when and where the Higgs boson discovery was announced.