Roger Highfield draws together a range of interesting facts about the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher at CERN* The £4.5 billion machine has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and lies an average of 100 metres (330 feet) under the ground, straddling French and Swiss territory. advertisement
* At full power, trillions of protons - subatomic particles - will race around the LHC accelerator ring 11,245 times a second. It is capable of achieving 600 million collisions every second.
* The machine counts as the world's largest fridge. All the magnets will be pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K).
* The LHC is the emptiest place in the Solar System too. To avoid colliding with gas molecules inside the accelerator, the beams of particles travel in an ultra-high vacuum - the internal pressure of the LHC is 10-13 atmospheres, ten times less than the pressure on the Moon.
* When two beams of protons collide, they will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun, concentrated within a miniscule space.
* When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually.
* A network of around 80,000 computers worldwide is being readied for a deluge of data that could fill a stack of CDs more than 12 miles (20 kilometres) tall.
