In the bowel of the LHC

At a workshop on "Numerical Holography" at CERN in Switzerland, PI Romatschke went 80 meters underground to get a tour of the CMS detector, one of the four major experiments currently being upgraded for the full-energy run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).The detector (22 meters long, 15 meters in diameter, 4000 tons), is partly visible in the background of the picture below (look for a barrel-shape). Once the LHC fires up again later this year (see here), the CMS detector will again be used to do experiments on the Higgs boson and strongly coupled quantum fluids.

 

[picture courtesy Razieh Pourhasan]