Hadronitörmäyttimessä

A hadronitörmäytin is a type of particle accelerator designed to collide hadrons. Hadrons are composite subatomic particles made up of quarks and gluons. The most common hadrons are protons and neutrons, which form the nucleus of atoms, and also mesons, which are composed of a quark and an antiquark.

The primary purpose of a hadron collider is to study the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that govern their interactions. By accelerating hadrons to extremely high energies and causing them to collide, scientists can create conditions that mimic the early universe shortly after the Big Bang. These high-energy collisions can produce new, often short-lived, particles that would not normally exist.

Detectors surrounding the collision point record the debris from these energetic impacts, allowing physicists to analyze the properties of the newly created particles and search for evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Examples of such colliders include the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which collides protons, and previously, the Tevatron, which collided antiprotons with protons. The high energies achieved in hadron colliders are crucial for probing the mass scales of fundamental particles and interactions.