To print: Click here or Select File and then Print from your browser's menu

This story was printed from silicon.com, located at http://www.silicon.com/

Story URL: http://hardware.silicon.com/servers/0,39024647,39167217,00.htm

Photos: The super-brain behind the particle smasher
How grid tech is sorting out the LHC...

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Monday 21 May 2007

When the LHC is switched on, a series of magnets will accelerate the particle beams - which are fired in opposite directions - through the tunnels and when the beams collide, the energy of the crash ejects a spray of new particles.

Detecting and sifting through the billions of collisions will be the job of four main detectors along the length of the LHC.

The two largest detectors, Atlas and CMS (pictured), are hunting for the elusive Higgs particle - which is also called the 'God particle' as it is believed to give mass to other particles .

Grey said only one in every million collisions are put on the grid as electronics filtering systems within the detectors decide whether an event is "interesting" or not.

An interesting event would be when the full energy of a collision has gone into creating a new particle - using Einstein's famous e=mc² equation, the more energy within a collision, the higher the chance of a previously undetected particle turning up because there is more energy available to transform into matter.

Grey added: "But even at that [one in one million] rate we're getting data at hundreds of megabytes per second from each detector and that means overall - as there are four big detectors - we're getting data of the order of gigabytes per second."

Photo credit: Cern