I have been fortunate enough to visit Large Hadron Collider in CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). Specifically two of the LHC detectors: LHCb and ATLAS. I have always wanted to look inside CERN as it is the focal point of particle physics. Thanks to prof. Kulhánek and his Aldebaran Group for Astrophysics, we got the unique opportunity to look inside CERN and I mean literally inside. We were allowed to go deep under ground to actual detectors of LHC.
To get to Geneva, we have traveled through Germany and France.
During our first day we have spent the night in a hotel in Speyer (Germany). We have also visited a technical museum there which displayed all sorts of vehicles, bikes, planes and even a Russian shuttlecraft Buran.
During the next day we drove to France to stay in a hotel located very close to Switzerland border. Staying in France was a way cheaper alternative. During the day 3 we finally came to Geneva to visit LHC. First we were guided through an LHC's detector called LHCb.
LHCb stands for "Large Hadron Collider beauty" and it serves as a research facility for CP symmetry studies. If you look closely at the logo of LHCb, you can see at the bottom half the ending mirrored Cb which looks like CP and it's crossed out. That's because CP symmetry was disproved with experiments conducted by James Cronin and Val Fitch in 1964. They were both awarded Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980. The little "b" was added to the name as this detector also studies so called beauty (bottom) quarks. The b quark is very difficult to study as it decays rapidly. It is also has a very high mass of 4.18GeV/c^2.
After LHCb we visited detector ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus).
ATLAS is a detector with a mass of 7000tons! It is a multifunctional detector capable of detecting Higgs Bosons.
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