Lighting industry

2018-12-29

How much liquid helium does the European Large Hadron Collider use?


The Large Hadron Collider is not only the world's largest particle accelerator, but also the world's largest machine. The 27-kilometer particle accelerator is located in a 100-meter-deep circular tunnel in the Swiss-French border. The tunnel is 26.659 km long and costs more than $6 billion. More than 2,000 physicists from dozens of countries and regions participated in the project. The researchers hope that the Large Hadron Collider will discover the existence of the "Grail" Higgs boson of particle physics. The Higgs boson was proposed by British scientist Peter Higgs in the 1960s to perfectly explain the source of material quality. It is the last unconfirmed particle in the so-called "standard model" particle physics theory. Also known as "God particle."


   

Before starting, it is mainly to complete the cooling of the superconducting magnet and the pre-acceleration of the proton beam. The biggest problem is to cool thousands of large superconducting magnets that make up the collider in a 27-meter underground tunnel 100 meters below the ground. 271 degrees Celsius. The whole tunnel is divided into 8 sections of equal length and cooled one by one, and the beam is passed through the experiment. Each section of cooling needs at least three or four weeks. If there is any problem in the experiment after cooling, it should be raised to room temperature to eliminate the fault. In the week, it will take two or three months for a cold and a hot one. Despite the hardships and unremitting efforts, all the magnets finally cooled down in July this year. The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest cooling system, with a total of 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen and 130 tons of liquid helium. (A common 40L cylinder is filled with helium, only 1kg, 130 tons of liquid helium, equivalent to 130,000 bottles of helium), of which the amount of liquid helium is about 1% of the world's annual output.




 The Large Hadron Collider will be able to achieve a terrible cold, and its temperature will drop to a colder than outer space, minus 456.25 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 271.3 degrees Celsius), close to absolute zero. So why cool the magnet to a low temperature close to absolute zero? Because at this low temperature, the magnet can work without any resistance. To this end, the Large Hadron Collider uses 10,800 tons of liquid nitrogen to cool the magnets to minus 193.2 degrees Celsius, and then cools them to the remaining temperature with about 60 tons of liquid helium to ensure that the huge magnets are precisely palm The camel particles move in a precise direction. Of course it is not an environmentally friendly device - in order to keep it frosty, it costs $100,000 a day in electricity. In other words, the Large Hadron Collider will consume 120 megawatts a year, which is equivalent to the electricity consumption of all households in Geneva.




 The entire investment is equivalent to the income of the entire Luxembourg Principality. Have they spent $20 billion on this project? That's a very difficult expense on the Viza credit card, but don't worry, many countries have participated and funded this project for decades, and the final total amount of money is close to the domestic production of the entire Luxembourg Principality. Total value ($33.87 billion). It is estimated that the total cost of the European Nuclear Physics Research Organization (CERN) is about 500 million Euros per year. The collider will operate for 20 years and the total operating cost will reach more than 10 billion euros. The proportion of gross national product is apportioned.


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