It is who you know that counts! The Worshipful Company of Water Conservators is very fortunate that one of our members works at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), or the European Council for Nuclear Research. This was a once in a lifetime experience.
Freeman Grzegorz Skowronek (Greg) offered to arrange a visit for members of the Company and friends when the accelerator was shut down for maintenance and the site was quiet. Greg has responsiblites for the water which is critical to the operation of the site including the provision of exceptionally pure water, water stoarge, and the treatment and disposal of waste water. Therefore while visiting the site we had to see the water facilities.
We visited the antimatter factory and saw where the antimater is produced before being sent to CERN’s varrious accelerators.
CERN produce their own custom built circuitboards and we were able to observe the intricate development of the circuits through a microscope. It was just like sewing.
The highlight of our visit was to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It started operating on 10 September 2008, and consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets and boosters which guide and accelerate the speed and energy of the particles close to the speed of light.
The particles travel in opposite directions in two separate beam pipes at ultra high vacuum similar to outer space. The electromagnets operate in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires the magnets to be refrigerated to ‑271.3C. Liquid helium is used as the refrigerant.
The wiring is between the sections of the detector is amazingly complex, The detectors around the collider pick up the passage of the subatomic particles produced by the collisions between the protons. We saw the great ranks of computers needed to process all the data from the collisions.
Our grateful thanks to our enthusiastic and facinating guides who sucessfully raised our understanding of particle physics.
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