Lords of the Ring

CERN Inside the 27-kilometre long tube, particles rush to their doom

The Large Hadron Collider is the most complicated object ever built by humans. Working at 300 degrees below room temperature and using the most powerful lasers, magnets and computers available, the scientists operating the Large Hadron Collider will probe deeper into matter than ever before.

Five experiments, with huge detectors, will study what happens when the Large Hadron Collider's beams of subatomic particles smash into each other. The detectors will handle as much information as the entire European telecommunications network, in the hope of coming up with a result that's worth the billions of euros that the project is costing.

ATLAS, the detector that Jon Butterworth and Brian Cox are helping to build, will weigh 7000 tonnes. Once in operation, it will be immersed in dangerous levels of radiation, and must be and be kept at a temperature close to absolute zero by the most sophisticated cooling system on the planet. The various parts of the machine will need to be aligned to an accuracy of 10 millionths of a metre and it will collect data at a rate equivalent to ten thousand Encyclopaedia Brittanicas per second.

"There's a hell of a lot of complex physics and engineering," Brian explains. "A lot of people see these things and think you go to a company and say 'build us a detector'. But you don't; because this is a one-off. There are some things in common with other industries, but no one needs exactly all the properties that we've got. So there's a lot of physics you have to do to make sure it works; and a lot of engineering you have to do put the thing together."

Even for the simplest tasks, Brian engages PhD students and graduates with first class honours degrees. "Quite a lot of the time they're gluing stuff together, sticking wires on things and seeing if they work. And that's kind of the grubby bit of particle physics that you've got to do in order to achieve all this wonderful stuff".

CERN The precision components are assembled in superclean conditions

Jon's team at UCL is working on part of the tracking, "basically the cameras which surround these collisions - the same technology that's in the centre of a digital camera. Except it's about this big…"

He holds his arms apart as far as they'll go. "And it's super aligned, because at tens of microns resolution, you need to really know where it is. We've been building it in the UK, and not just at UCL: in fact it was assembled in a basement at Oxford. It's a bit James Bond down there, there are guys in snowsuits and clean rooms - it's very, very precise stuff.