• Question: Is their anywhere else where they have a large hadron collider?

    Asked by lisaloo to Claire on 17 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Nope! It’s a one of a kind!

      Good job, too, since it cost a lot of money to build, and is funded by a bunch of different countries together.

      The USA just shut down their biggest accelerator called the Tevatron, at Fermilab near Chicago. The Tevatron was very similar, except it smashed protons and anti-protons together (LHC does proton-proton). Also, the energy was less – one way of measuring energy is in electron volts (eV). 1 TeV (tera electron volt) is about the energy of a flying mosquito 🙂 It seems small for us, but it’s HUGE when you’re talking about a single proton having that energy.

      The Tevatron managed to get a collision energy of 1.8 TeV. At the LHC we got 8 TeV when we stopped running this year, and we’ll hopefull have even higher energies when we start up again in 2015 after the upgrade.

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