LARGE HADRON COLLIDER! LARGE HADRON COLLIDER! LARGE HADRON COLLIDER!
-Zippy
I have one annoyance with the LHC: we didn't build it here in the 80's as the SSC, but I can't fault CERN for that. But I'll take my physics wherever I can find it, and in that respect, I care not what border the calorimeter is behind. Plus, the folks at CERN made a great video:
LHCb sees where the antimatter's gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
They're lookin' for whatever particles they can find
Charge parity violation, how? HOW?
Will we see supersymmetric particles?
Is there a Higgs, or not?
The first question will clear up an important observational fact: the universe seems to consiste wholly of regular ANSI standard, Grade A matter, and not equal parts antimatter. The strong force, which we will gleefully rend asunder with 7 TeV of energy doesn't seem to break CP symmetry, while photons and its cousins, the Z and the two W, and may be related to why there is matter and no antimatter. At least, I suspect it might, and the more energy we throw at the problem, the clearer the picture may become. That's what the LHCb detector is for.
The second may be related to the third question: are there heavy shadow particles that are counterparts to the lighter ones we see all the time? Supersymmetry has the potential to sweep a lot, and I mean a LOT, of messy mathematics under the rug with the awesome power of renormalization. Pump enough energy into these collisions and you can make almost anything at the required energy domain. As a bonus, it will be another nail in the coffin of the M-theory superstring fanatics that won't die.
And the Higgs...that little fat boson (or family of bosons...WE DON'T KNOW) may be able to tell us why things have mass in the first place, and unlock a brand new series of questions that will be truly new physics no matter what. It will either validate the Standard Model and extend it or force us to toss it out the window...either way, we get new physics and new particles with new interactions and, oh, I will spend many hours just trying to understand what is coming out of ATLAS and CMS.
I don't get too excited over lead ion collisions, so I don't care about ALICE. Give me electrons or protons please. Monopoles won't come out of ion collisions. (Oh yeah, if there are really such things as monopoles (and I doubt there are) this is the machine that will finally find them.)
One thing.
The accelerators are cooled by liquid helium, not something you can just pick up at the corner store as you can with plutonium. The bulk of the helium comes from Algeria, and...Russia.
I swear, if Russia cuts off the helium supply and the magnets can't be cooled and I don't get to know the last act of the Higgs saga, I will advocate nuclear carpet bombing from their western border and advancing across Moscow until the helium is delivered.