Question: How did you make the Hadron Collider?

Dawn Gillies answered on 9 Nov 2016:

I only made test equipment for a small part of the large hadron collider. Building it was a massive project where researchers from all over the world collaborated for years before it was up and running! It took about 10 years just to build!

It is a 27km ring which lies underground under the French-Swiss border. It’s a really fascinating machine. If you’d like to find out more about it you can look here (http://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider) where you can even take a virtual tour of it!

The piece of equipment I built was to test a bit of the technology which makes sure everything is safe when the beam is transferred into the large hadron collider from a slightly smaller accelerator. The beams are accelerated from a tiny accelerator to a bigger one and a bigger one to give it more and more energy before it makes it to the biggest accelerator, the large hadron collider.