The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the most impressive particle colliders that's ever been built, and the people who run it have a monumental job — searching for evidence of new matter that's yet to be discovered.
They've succeeded more than once already. In 2012, scientists at CERN discovered the Higgs boson, and just last month the organization announced that they'd found a new class of particles known as pentaquarks.
The LHC, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, has made all this possible. The machine is housed underground, deep beneath the international border separating France from Switzerland, and is 16 miles long.
Inside, particle beams in the accelerator smash into each other at close to the speed of light to essentially simulate the split second after the Big Bang. Scientists then study the particles produced by the collisions.
The LHC was shut down for two years to undergo upgrades. The revamped LHC, which opened in April, allows physicists to test "previously untestable theories" and search for more new particles. Their recent discovery of pentaquarks is a testament to these new capabilities.
"It would be a catastrophe if we didn't find new particles," CERN physicist Eva Barbara Holzer told Business Insider.
We recently visited the CERN headquarters in Switzerland to get a first-hand look:
The first thing you see when you walk into the building that houses the Control Center is a reminder of what the collider looks like underground.
This is what the collider looks like underground. It's housed in a tunnel 328 feet underground so that stray radiation doesn't reach the surface. The tunnel that houses the LHC is about 16 miles long.
Source: CERN
The Control Center is crucial for the operation of the LHC. Dozens of screens display the information necessary to monitor the collider's activity.
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