South African physicist Dr. Claire Lee, who is based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, (CERN), left a U3A audience spellbound after a giving them a virtual tour of a the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN which operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, was established in 1954. It is housed in Meyrin, in the western suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border and comprises 24 member states.
The LHC, built 100m below the ground in 1998, took a decade to complete. It is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator – to smash particles, mainly protons together at nearly the speed of light to study fundamental physics. The tunnel runs between Meyrin, Switzerland and Saint-Genis-Pouilly, France.
CERN probes the fundamental structure of particles that make up everything around the planet and do so using the earth’s largest and most complex scientific instruments. Its primary focus is high-energy particle physics, but it also contributes to computing, medical applications, and other areas.
The LHC helps scientists explore the basic building blocks of the universe. It has led to major discoveries, including the Higgs boson in 2012, which explains why particles have mass.
One of CERN’S many areas of study, is climate change which explores how cosmic rays and solar activity influence Earth’s climate. Through experiments like CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets), scientists investigate how cosmic rays affect cloud formation by influencing aerosols and condensation processes. These studies help understand natural climate variability alongside human-caused factors like greenhouse gases.
A packed auditorium at the U3A gathering at Settlers Park could easily have been intimidated by the high-tech engineering feat and scientific detail – but they put questions put to Lee, who is working on CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment.
What about the life expectancy of the project, an audience member asked. Could it become redundant?
The LHC will be followed by the Future Circular Collider (FCC), Lee explained. CERN’s proposed next-generation particle accelerator, to be built between 2030 and 2040), designed to surpass the LHC in energy and capabilities and will be built into a 91km circular tunnel below ground level.
“An upgrade of the facility is going to proceed for another 10 years (from 2030),” said Lee.
“Yes, we are also thinking what’s going to happen after 2040. Because by that time the upgrade will give us more collisions per second. But we will still be sitting at the same energy. If you want to explore different parts of the universe, you actually need to increase the energy of your collisions, which means taking those protons and making them go even faster.
“One of the things we are studying now which is a feasibility study, is to build an underground tunnel which is 100km long; the LHC will then be a feeder into a bigger tunnel, (for the Future Circular Collider) and when it’s built, this tunnel will go under lake Geneva and under the mountains and around the city,” said Lee.
“The FCC 100km- long tunnel is due for 2040, and depending on how we construct that it will be the year 2070 or 2080 before we get data from this invention,” she added.
Another question from the floor concerned the formation of black holes – a region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape. So, has CERN through its LHC experiment, ever created a black hole?
“We have since we started, had people studying events that could make up a black hole and, unfortunately, we have not yet seen any signature of black holes,” said Lee.
“The thing is, even though the LHC collides protons at such high energy, we don’t have enough energy density to create black holes. So, why are we even bothering to carry on with this experiment?
“Well if you understand how the theory of gravity works, what happens is the only way in which you can get enough density using protons collided by the LHC ,is actually if gravity gets stronger on the very tiny scales we are talking about, when we are smashing protons together.
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- This article was first published in Talk of the Town, February 20 , 2025. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays.
