CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Gets the Google Maps Treatment

By Nathan Eddy

This is the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC beauty experiment will shed light on why we live in a universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter.

This is the 7,000-ton ATLAS detector. From a cavern 100 meters below a small Swiss village, it’s probing for fundamental particles including the Higgs Boson.

ALICE is a heavy-ion detector on the LHC ring, designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma forms.

CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, where some of the world’s best physicists and engineers use advanced particle accelerators to help solve age-old questions about the universe—like what it’s made of and how it started.

The Globe of Science and Innovation is a landmark of CERN, the purpose of which is to inform visitors about the significant research at the research facility.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the LHC, designed to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs Boson, extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.

One of the seven particle detector experiments conducted at the LHC, the experiment is a collaboration involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 175 institutions in 38 countries.

The exterior’s simple, minimal modern design belies the cavernous underground spaces and intricate technical complexity going on below.

This view, not from Google Street View, shows the interior of office building 40 at the Meyrin, Switzerland, site. Building 40 hosts many offices for scientists working for CMS and ATLAS. Photo credit: Gillis Danielsen

The ALICE Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is the main particle tracking device in ALICE. Charged particles crossing the gas of the TPC ionize the gas atoms along their path, liberating electrons that drift toward the end plates of the detector.