notanotherclairebear

hmmmm.....

Do you wanna build a model?

Of particles and all their fields...

We need something to unify,

and maybe simplify,

describe all our event yields.

It gets a little lonely

with just one family

so why can't we just have three?

Do you wanna build a model?

We'll call it the Standard Model

<go away, gravity!>

Ok bye...

EDIT: obligatory thank you for the gold kind stranger! (my first gold too, woot!)

hahaha ok - really 5 or like a general member of the public 5? (I have a 5 year old)

EDIT: Ok, general member of the public 5 it is!

Why are we doing this? Well, mainly because we want to! Scientist are... sort of like kids, actually. Curious about the world (and occasionally smashing things together to see how they work). We want to understand our universe, and why it looks and acts the way it does. In particle physics we think of the universe as being made up of tiny little "building blocks" - legos, if you like. There are different types of blocks, too - some that we use to make up things, and others that are used to join the pieces together. These are the matter particles (we call them "fermions") and the force particles ("bosons"). We can't say we really understand our universe until we know why all these different pieces look exactly the way they do, and act exactly the way we do. And we really really want to understand these things!

Why is it important & what could we do? These are trickier questions :) There's the obviously vague answer - because knowing more about our universe will lead us to future breakthroughs and discoveries. But we can't really say what! But here are some short examples of what has happened in the past:

• When Einstein developed his theory of General Relativity, he just wanted to explain the way gravity worked. Now, your GPS locator in your smartphone uses these exact GR equations to remain accurate.

• most particle accelerators are actually found in hospitals, in MRI machines, helping with diagnostic medicine.

• the web was developed right here at CERN to help scientists transmit important pieces of information to each other and aid in data analysis. Now, hello! :)

• the Grid, which is a network of high performance computers we use to analyse the vast amounts of data we get from our experiments, is also used in other fields (such as breast cancer image processing, I think)

Clap your hands together. Congratulations, you've made a collision with more energy than the LHC :)

The difference though, is in the energy density. Stick a thumbtack against one of your palms, and clap again. Notice the difference? :D By concentrating the collision point, even with the same total energy we get a more intense collision. Protons are really, really, really tiny, so when they collide the energy density is huge, making the results a lot more interesting than a hand clap.

No, SERN beat us to that :(

Well, in an ideal world we'd want as much energy as we can get! :) But there are many limitations. The LHC as it is currently designed is for 14 TeV centre-of-mass collisions. The magnets have now been trained for 6.5 TeV per beam, making 13 TeV centre-of-mass collisions, but if all goes well in the next year or so we'll try to get up to the design energy of 7 TeV per beam.

Of course, the experiments themselves were built specifically as per the energy designs, and we have already started working on the upgrades to our detectors for when we do the higher luminosity running.

And then, in the far future, people are already working on the design and physics scope for future colliders, even up to a 100km-circumference Future Circular Collider