From the February 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 48 comments

Large Hadron Collider: The Discovery Machine ( Preview )

A global collaboration of scientists is preparing to start up the greatest particle physics experiment in history

All Together Now

When everything is working together, including the beams colliding at the center of each detector, the task faced by the detectors and the data-processing systems will be Herculean. At the design luminosity, as many as 20 events will occur with each crossing of the needlelike bunches of protons. A mere 25 nanoseconds pass between one crossing and the next (some have larger gaps). Product particles sprayed out from the collisions of one crossing will still be moving through the outer layers of a detector when the next crossing is already taking place. Individual elements in each of the detector layers respond as a particle of the right kind passes through it. The millions of channels of data streaming away from the detector produce about a megabyte of data from each event: a petabyte, or a billion megabytes, of it every two seconds.

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