Since the mid-1980s, a new round of
discussions has been taking place with the
aim of defining various options for the
post-LEP era.
There is a general consensus among the
world's scientific community that by
reaching higher energies we shall probably
be able to answer fundamental questions left
unanswered by LEP, the most important
being the mechanism which gives matter its
mass.
In December 1994 CERN's governing body,
Council, officially approved the construction
of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -
a technologically challenging superconducting
ring, which will be installed in the existing
LEP tunnel - to provide proton-proton
collisions at energies 10 times greater than any previous
machine.
In keeping CERN's
cost-effective strategy of building on previous investments, it is
designed to share the 27-kilometre LEP tunnel, and be fed by
existing particle sources and pre-accelerators. A challenging
machine, the LHC will use the most advanced superconducting
magnet and accelerator technologies ever employed.
LHC experiments are, of course, being
designed to look for theoretically predicted
phenomena. However, they must also be prepared,
as far as is possible, for surprises. This will
require great ingenuity on the part of the
physicists and engineers.
More information about the LHC project is available
there.
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