The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

Abstract : The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project is a tool to study the universe when it was very young by probing the connection between the world of today with the distant past. The very high energy density created by the LHC machine mimicks the situation which prevailed shortly (~pico-seconds) after the Big Bang. The technological feat achieved for colliding protons with energy several thousand times the proton mass is achieved through a number of innovations. The large scale multipurpose experiments at the LHC use equally commendable cutting edge technology. The LHC project is designed for long term operation with intermittent shut down periods for upgrading the machine and experiments. The second phase of the LHC has just started with double the energy compared to Run1. It brings in heavy excitement with the possibility of discovering the unknown. The most spectacular harvest of LHC-Run1 has been the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which brought into the field the Nobel prize for physics in 2013. We shall elucidate on the basic idea about the Higgs boson and briefly describe how it was discovered.