Build your own collision
Inject proton bunches, accelerate them to almost the speed of light and cross the beams in the heart of a detector, all live, driven by sliders.
The simulation is illustrative: it captures how the LHC ring works (injection from the SPS, acceleration in RF cavities, bending by 1232 dipole magnets and collisions at ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb), and the numbers are approximate.
Six steps from hydrogen to a collision
Before the protons meet in a detector, they pass through the whole chain of CERN accelerators.
Source
An electric field strips electrons from hydrogen, leaving bare protons.
Chain
Linac → Booster → PS → SPS gradually speed the beam up before the LHC.
Injection
Bunches enter the two counter-rotating pipes of the ring.
Ramp-up
RF cavities add energy on every lap, up to 6.8 TeV per beam.
Collision
At 4 points the beams cross 40 million times a second.
Detection
Detector layers reconstruct the tracks of decay products.
Detectors at the collision points
Each of the four main experiments looks at collisions differently, switch to Detector mode to see the decay tracks.
ATLAS
46 m long, 25 m across, the largest LHC detector. Co-discoverer of the Higgs boson.
CMS
Compact, but heavier than the Eiffel Tower. The second team that confirmed the Higgs.
ALICE
Studies the quark-gluon plasma in heavy lead-ion collisions.
LHCb
Tracks subtle differences between matter and antimatter in b-quark decays.
Frequently asked questions
From the CRT to the accelerator
The same idea, an accelerated beam of particles, at the scale of your living room and at the scale of 27 kilometres.