The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerators with a 27km circumference with over 9,000 magnets that can generate 9 billion collisions per second. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.
It sits on the border between France and Switzerland 100m underground and is run by CERN, an international scientific collaboration with 23 different member states: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.
There is even a [email protected] project where you can contribute your computer's spare computational power to analyzing the huge mass of data this project generates, no PhD required! Each year of operation generates approx 30 petabytes of data, equivalent to 1.2 million bluray disks.
https://home.cern/resources/faqs/facts-and-figures-about-lhc
May peace and science always triumph over war and ignorance 🕊️
The picture shows the one of the detectors, the CMS, where some of the experiments are measured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Muon_Solenoid