Photos: Building the biggest collider
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Heart of the machine
A worker stands inside the ATLAS detector, surrounded by its eight toroidal magnets, just before the installation of the machine's calorimeter. ATLAS, the largest particle detector at Europe's Large Hadron Collider, sits inside an underground cavern as big as a cathedral. (Maximilien Brice / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Mission control
Members of the ATLAS detector team monitor operations at their control room on the campus of Europe's CERN particle-physics research center. A cutaway view of the particle detector can be seen on the computer screen at far right. (Claudia Marcelloni / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Down the hole
The last of 1,746 superconducting magnets is lowered into the Large Hadron Collider's beamline tunnel via a specially constructed pit in April 2007, as seen in this fish-eye view. Dipole magnets like this one produce a magnetic field that is 100,000 times stronger than Earth's, to bend beams of subatomic particles around the circular accelerator. (Claudia Marcelloni / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Making the connection
A welder works on the interconnection between two of the Large Hadron Collider's superconducting magnet systems in the collider tunnel. (Maximilien Brice / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Wheel of fortune
One of the wheel-shaped slices of the ATLAS muon detector is lowered into a cavern for assembly into a giant device designed to look for evidence of exotic subatomic particles such as the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle is thought to play a key role in producing the property of mass in the universe. Click on the "Play" button to get a sense of ATLAS' scale, as well as the simulated tracks of a Higgs boson in the detector. (Claudia Marcelloni & J. Pequenao / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
The theorist and the experiment
World-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking takes a look at the Large Hadron Collider's underground beamline during a visit in September 2006. (CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Pulling the trigger
Each experiment at the Large Hadron Collider requires a "trigger," a combination of hardware and software that decides which collisions are significant enough to pass along for further analysis. This is a fish-eye view inside the trigger chambers for the ALICE detector's muon spectrometer. (Aurelien Muller / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Inside the big bang
A technician from the ALICE installation team works on gas pipes for the detector. ALICE is designed to study lead-ion collisions so intense that they re-create the conditions that existed just after the big bang. Click on the "Play" button to see the ALICE detector and a simulation of the subatomic particles thrown off by a "little big bang." (A. Saba & Mona Schweizer / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Cycles within cycles
Technicians often use bicycles to get around the Large Hadron Collider's 17-mile-round tunnel. (Maximilien Brice / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
Dwarfed by science
The LHCb detector is designed to study why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe. The worker peeking out from the concrete barriers at left is dwarfed by the detector's lip-shaped magnet assembly at right. (CERN) Back to slideshow navigation -
The PC farm
CERN's Computer Center will store the quadrillions of bytes of data generated by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and distribute the information to thousands of researchers around the world, using a network known as the LHC Computing Grid. (Maximilien Brice / CERN) Back to slideshow navigation
Related: LHC
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