About the US/LHC Project

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland is opening new vistas on the deepest secrets of the universe, stretching the imagination with newly discovered forms of matter, forces of nature, and dimensions of space. This site provides general information about the Large Hadron Collider and detailed information about American participation in the LHC accelerator and experiments. U.S. LHC participation is supported by the US Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers). This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. (Courtesy: CERN)

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Teachers and Students

This is the dawn of an exciting age of new discovery in the study of elementary particles and their interactions. The current theoretical framework of the fundamental nature of matter, known as the Standard Model, explains much, but leaves many unanswered questions. What is dark matter? What happened to antimatter? Are there extra dimensions of spacetime? Are there new symmetries of nature? Are there new, as yet unobserved, forces? What is responsible for mass? The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a huge scientific instrument at CERN, provides the highest-energy particle collisions produced in a laboratory to six experiments that hold the potential to answer these questions.

Event of the Week, 11/13/2012: LHCb: Rare dimuons set a new Standard for the Model

After two years taking data on B meson decays, the LHCb collaboration has nailed down the fraction of the B-zero-s decays that results in two muons. And it is rare—only 3.54 in a billion—just as the Standard Model predicts. Even though there are good reasons to look for physics beyond it, the Standard Model just keeps on going! The two muons that come from the B-zero-s candidate are magenta horizontal tracks. The BBC article describes the significance of this result for supersymmetry. Credit: Copyright CERN for the LHCb Collaboration.

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Event of the Month images are hosted on Flickr.