The Fantastic Machine That Found the Higgs Boson....Pics 2

Precision work is performed on the semiconductor tracker barrel of the ATLAS experiment, on November 11, 2005. All work on these delicate components must be performed in a clean room so that impurities in the air, such as dust, do not contaminate the detector. The semiconductor tracker will be mounted in the barrel close to the heart of the ATLAS experiment to detect the path of particles produced in proton-proton collisions.

The huge ATLAS Toroid Magnet End-Cap A is transported between building 180 to ATLAS point 1 on May 29, 2007.

Lowering of one of the two ATLAS muon small wheels into the cavern, on February 15, 2008. The tunnel runs as deep as 175 meters (574 ft) underground. 

View of the Compact Muon Solenoid cavern with its impressive dimensions: 53 meters long, 27 meters wide and 24 meters high.

A major milestone in the assembly of the ATLAS experiment's inner detector. The semiconductor tracker (SCT) and transition radiation tracker (TRT) are two of the three major parts of the ATLAS inner detector. Together, they will help determine trajectories of particle collisions produced when the LHC is switched on. February 22, 2006.

he electromagnetic calorimeter, completely assembled, is a wall more than 6 m high and 7 m wide, consisting of 3,300 blocks of scintillator, fibre optics and lead. This huge wall will measure the energy of particles produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC when it is started in 2008. Photons, electrons and positrons will pass through the layers of material in these modules and deposit their energy in the detector through a shower of particles. May 17, 2005. 

Integration of the ALICE experiment's inner tracker in 2007. 

The Fantastic Machine That Found the Higgs Boson.... 1

On July 4, scientists working with data from ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced the discovery of a new particle "consistent with" the Higgs boson -- a subatomic particle also colloquially referred to as the "God particle." After years of design and construction, the LHC first sent protons around its 27 kilometer (17 mile) underground tunnel in 2008. Four years later, the LHC's role in the discovery of the Higgs boson provides a final missing piece for the Standard Model of Particle Physics -- a piece that may explain how otherwise massless subatomic particles can acquire mass. Gathered here are images from the construction of the massive $4-billion-dollar machine that allowed us peer so closely into the subatomic world.

View of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Tracker Outer Barrel in the cleaning room on January 19, 2007. The CMS is a general-purpose detector, part of the Large hadron Collider (LHC), and is capable of studying many aspects of proton collisions at 14 trillion electronvolts.

Civil Engineering in the ATLAS cavern. This cavern that will eventually house the ATLAS 

experiment, part of the LHC at CERN. February 22, 2000. 

Various phases of the instrumentation of the ATLAS barrel tile calorimeter at CERN. ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of seven particle detector experiments constructed at the Large Hadron Collider. October 28, 1997. 

Part of the LHC, in its tunnel at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland, on May 31, 2007.

The globe of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, illuminated outside Geneva, Switzerland, on March 30, 2010.

Pictures from the Compact Muon Solenoid pixel-strip integration test performed at the Tracker Integration Facility on July 18, 2007.

Work on the first half tracker inner barrel/inner disk in the Compact Muon Solenoid clean room, on October 19, 2006.

One module of the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) photon spectrometer. There are 3,584 lead tungstate crystals on the first module for the ALICE photon spectrometer. Lead tungstate crystals have the optical transparency of glass combined with much higher density, and can serve as scintillators, lighting up when when struck by an incoming particle. 

A scientist performs maintenance in the CERN LHC computing grid center in Geneva, on October 3, 2008. This center is one of the 140 data processing centers, located in 33 countries, taking part in the grid processing project. More than 15 million Gigabytes of data produced from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions in the LHC should be collected every year.