Special focus on the Large Hadron Collider

Various: Fourteen years ago, scientists at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, had only plans for a new highest energy particle smasher. Now, thanks to the efforts of thousands of people, the $5.5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which stretches through a 27-kilometer ring of tunnel between Lake Geneva to the east and France's Jura Mountains to the west is nearly complete and will be switched on for the first time next Wednesday. Science magazine celebrates the near completion of the construction project in four articles that look at different aspects of the device. Expectations are sky-high, but discoveries may still be years away says reporter Adrian Cho, who adds that physicists are placing bets over what the LHC may discover. For example, Tommaso Dorigo, an experimenter at the University of Padua in Italy, doubts that the LHC will find evidence of supersymmetry, a theoretical scheme that predicts a massive "superpartner" for every known particle in current standard model. "I realized I don't believe in the thing," he says. Dorigo has bet $1000 with two other physicists that, after the LHC has accumulated a certain amount of data, it will see no sign of supersymmetry.Reporter Daniel Clery on the other-hand has looks at how CERN will manage the vast quantities of data (15 petabytes every year) produced by the machine through a grid computing network called LCG. Dedicated fiber-optic lines have been laid down to whisk the data away from CERN to some 250 other physics labs in 50 countries worldwide, where about 100,000 PC processors are ready and waiting to receive them. "By an order of magnitude, this is the biggest grid [yet assembled]," says John Gordon, deputy director of GridPP, the United Kingdom's contribution to the LCG. Not everyone is convince the grid will be able to cope with the data load.Both writers combine forces to look at one aspect which is causing some CERN lawyers sleepless nights, combating lawsuits against the LHC over concerns it might destroy the planet. Physicists may have unwittingly helped foment panic by talking too glibly about blackholes, says CERN theorist John Ellis. "Maybe we should be more careful with our rhetoric," he says. "For example, we talk about recreating the big bang, and people think, 'Oh my God, they're going to recreate the big bang!' " Of course, he adds, physicists don't aim to literally return the universe to its fiery birth, just to mimic those conditions in fleeting particle collisions.Meanwhile, Eric Schelkoff from the Daily Chronicle looks at Fermilab's link to the project, and how it will impact the Tevatron, the LHC competitor that will stay online until 2010. "We want to make sure we get our full money's worth out of the Tevatron," says Roger Dixon, head of the Fermilab Accelerator Division. Related Articles The Overture Begins Researchers, Place Your Bets! Bracing for a Maelstrom of Data, CERN Puts Its Faith in the Grid Is the LHC a Doomsday Machine? Fermilab has a stake in collider Related News Picks Two protons walk into a black hole, and other jokes physicists tell Grid computing at the Large Hadron Collider Courts weigh subatomic doomsday claims against CERN Final LHC synchronization test a success Large hadron collider close to completion What will the LHC tell us about physics? Physics expert: European collider is safe CERN report confirms Earth will not be destroyed by a LHC-producedblack hole Higgs convinced LHC will see Higgs boson particle Time Machine To Be Created Underground? Probably Not Particle Collider in Europe, Long Awaited by Physicists, Is DelayedUntil 2008 Large Hadron Collider delayed Massive Particle Accelerator Revving Up, as Fermilab mistake delays LHC Nobel winner anticipates next physics chapter