By the Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board.
Print report!
 
 
OVERVIEW

Our goal is to prevent, and also make plans on surviving when possible, particle accelerator mishaps including quantum vacuum collapse, mining the quantum vacuum, formation of a stable strangelet, and the creation of artificial mini-black holes.
 

 

The ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction. The LHC is 27 kilometers (16.7 miles) long and spans two countries.

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Scientists have run simulations of what they expect to see once the collider is operating. This is a simulation of the decay of the Higgs boson in the CMS detector, an event that virtually everybody hopes to see.

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed, but plays a key role in explaining the origins of the mass of other elementary particles, in particular the difference between the massless photon and the very heavy W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus if it exists, the Higgs boson has an enormous effect on the world around us.
 
 

Some people are worrying about the world's next-generation particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open for business next year at CERN's facility on the Franco-Swiss border. The LHC site says:

"According to some theoretical models, tiny black holes could be produced in collisions at the LHC. They would then very quickly decay into what is known as Hawking radiation (the tinier the black hole, the faster it evaporates) which would be detected by experiments."