LHCexperiments

The LHC experiments are a set of particle physics experiments conducted at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. They are designed to study fundamental questions about matter, energy, and the forces of nature by analyzing high-energy proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions produced in the accelerator.

The four largest and most widely known experiments are ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb. ATLAS and CMS are general‑purpose detectors built to observe a broad range of phenomena, including Higgs boson production, precision measurements of standard model processes, and searches for new particles. ALICE specializes in heavy-ion collisions to study quark‑gluon plasma and the behavior of matter at extreme temperature and density. LHCb focuses on precision measurements of CP violation and rare decays in beauty hadrons to understand the matter–antimatter asymmetry of the universe.

The experiments operate at collision energies up to about 13 TeV per beam and generate enormous data rates. They rely on multi-level trigger systems to select interesting events in real time and on distributed computing networks to store, simulate, and analyze the data. Notable results include the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by ATLAS and CMS and ongoing investigations into Higgs properties, standard-model processes, and searches for physics beyond the standard model.

LHC experiments are international collaborations involving thousands of scientists, engineers, and students from hundreds of institutions. They depend on ongoing detector upgrades, software development, and global data-processing infrastructure, with plans for the High-Luminosity LHC to increase collision rates and data collection.