The LHC is currently the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It is the main accelerator at CERN, and consists of an underground tunnel 27-kilometres long (shown here in yellow) containing superconducting magnets, cooling systems and other infrastructure surrounding two beam pipes. These receive particles from a chain of lower-energy accelerators.

The particles’ energy is boosted by accelerating structures until they are travelling at near the speed of light. They travel in opposite directions around each of the beam pipes.

They are then forced to collide inside one of four gigantic underground detectors: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

References

Main LHC website: http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/large-hadron-collider