What is the LHC and why are they making it?

Answer 1

If you are talking about LHC as the Large Hadron Collider, it is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008. The LHC will be the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator when in operation.

They are building it to verify the existence of the Higgs boson. Finding a Higgs boson would be a huge advance in the search to unify three of the four fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force.

Answer 2

Charles is correct. The Large Hadron Collider is located outside Geneva, Switzerland. CERN (which is a French acronym for European Organization for Nuclear Research) is an incorporated organization devoted to designing, building, installing, and operating the LHC. After several schedule slips, they hope to conduct their first experiments in mid-2008.

One of the hadrons they hope to find is the Higgs boson. This theoretical particle is supposed to carry the message to all other particles as to whether the other particles behave like a mass or an energy without mass. If the Higgs boson is identified, that will go a long way towards unifying the four fundamental forces under one descriptive theory.

String theorists also hope to conduct some experiments that will help to validate (or not) some basic tenets of string/M theory. [See source.]

Answer 3

LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider.
When Congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider in the fall of 1993, American physicists immediately began seeking alternatives to that mammoth $11 billion accelerator that was to have been built in Texas. As it happened, European physicists were working on plans for a more modest but still capable machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to be located at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (also known as CERN), which straddles the border between Switzerland and France near Geneva. Even at the current cost estimate of $3 billion, the LHC stretches the research budgets of the CERN member nations in Europe, so the laboratory is seeking participation from elsewhere. A U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) advisory panel recommended that the United States declare its intention to join other nations constructing the LHC and to initiate negotiations toward that goal. DOE and congressional response to the report was favorable, but U.S. action awaited further developments, not the least of which was formal agreement by the CERN member nations to proceed; in a mid-December vote the 19 CERN members gave the go-ahead for the LHC.

Answer 4

LHC is a Lithium-Hydrogen-Carbon molecule. No idea why they're making it.