Question 2 of 21

What are hadrons?

... The LHC sends two beams of subatomic particles -- called hadrons -- in opposite directions through the accelerator.

Question 3 of 21

How deep underground is the LHC?

... It's housed in a tunnel about 328 feet (100 meters) beneath Geneva, Switzerland.

Question 4 of 21

What group operates the LHC?

... The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, heads the work. Twenty nations are members, but other nations also partner with CERN on experiments.

Question 5 of 21

What do the CERN scientists hope to create in the LHC?

... No one knows what conditions were like just after the Big Bang, but researchers think they can recreate these conditions by colliding two streams of hadrons in the LHC.

Question 6 of 21

What might the Higgs boson tell us?

... The Higgs boson, often called "the God particle," may be able to tell scientists why objects have mass. This particle has never been observed, but LHC projects are searching for it.

Question 7 of 21

Do physicists think there are dimensions beyond the four that Einstein demonstrated?

... The LHC perhaps will reveal additional dimensions that are only detectable at high energies.

Question 8 of 21

What percent of the universe is probably dark matter?

... About 96 percent of the universe is dark matter, and scientists are using the LHC to determine what this hard-to-detect material really is.

Question 9 of 21

What guides the particles through the accelerator ring in the LHC?

... These magnets are built from cables that conduct electricity without resistance or loss of energy. They are kept at -456 degrees Fahrenheit (-271 degrees Celsius).

Question 10 of 21

What are the particle collisions in the LHC timed to be near?

... The beams in the LHC are made to collide in the vicinity of the four particle detectors.

Question 11 of 21

At full speed, how fast will the protons in the LHC move?

... The protons will move around the underground ring 11,245 times a second, at about 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light.

Question 12 of 21

The LHC can generate up to how many proton collisions per second?

... The detectors that record up to 600 million proton collisions a second can measure the passage of particles accurately to a few billionths of a second.

Question 13 of 21

What is the name of the computer network that analyzes LHC data?

... Tens of thousands of computers worldwide will be linked over the next decade in an arrangement called the Grid.

Question 14 of 21

What is the RHIC?

... The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider is in New York. Its accelerator ring is 3.8 kilometers (2.3 miles) compared to the LHC's 27 kilometers (17 miles).

Question 15 of 21

Could the LHC actually produce black holes?

... Scientists admit the LHC could produce miniscule black holes (points where matter collapses on itself). But these holes would collapse almost immediately and probably wouldn't suck us all into another dimension.

Question 16 of 21

What upgrade is proposed for the LHC in 2019?

... Upgrading to the Super Large Hadron Collider would increase luminosity, making it easier to observe rare processes.

Question 17 of 21

What is the problem with the argument that a runaway fusion reaction might be created in the LHC's tunnel nitrogen tanks?

... There are no nitrogen tanks in the tunnel, and even if there were, fusion could not be maintained under those conditions.

Question 18 of 21

How long did it take to dig the caverns to house the LHC?

... Excavations started in 1998 and finished five years later.

Question 19 of 21

What science fiction staple might be possible with the LHC?

... In early 2011, two Vanderbilt University scholars proposed that the LHC could send particles -- not people -- back and forth in time.

Question 20 of 21

What dense substance excited LHC researchers in the spring of 2011?

... The quark-gluon plasma, the basis for matter, is what the universe was made of right after the Big Bang, scientists say. It is 100,000 times hotter than the sun and one cubic centimeter would weigh 40 billion tons (36.3 billion metric tons).

Question 21 of 21

What did the LHC cost to build?

... The LHC cost around $4.5 billion, with each of the partner countries kicking in a share.

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