The document provides an overview of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, emphasizing its significance as a major engineering and physics undertaking aimed at exploring fundamental particles. It highlights safety concerns about micro black holes created in particle collisions, asserting their negligible threat to Earth based on existing theoretical calculations. The presentation also notes CERN's historical contributions, including the invention of the World Wide Web, and documents the LHC's operational challenges and successes up to 2011.

1. CERN A VERY SHORT EXPLANATION OF THE LHC (LARGE HADRON COLLIDER) AT CERN (Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire), GENÈVA, Switzerland This presentation was composed in order to qualify for teaching in English language at the university of Burgos Alfonso de la Fuente Ruiz, 2011

2. What is the LHC?

3. A huge engineering project Civil engineering at its best, computer science supporting and theoretical physics leading the way into the unknown.

4. The power of the atom, unleashed After the sad events at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer led the physics community towards a happier goal, for retribution

5. A European Union endeavour Álvaro de Rújula, representative spanish manager in theoretical physics at CERN

6. The Lord of the Rings Subatomic particles are accelerated at practically the speed of light along a 27 kms. circular tunnel right under the city of Genèva (Switzerland)

7. LHC lies 175 m underground

8. CERN employs 1/3 students

9. Smashing things together Hadron collisions being registered in 3D (full-res.)

10. The particle zoo A quest for the Higgs boson?

11. Black Hole danger? No way!

12. But why not? Safety of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider: Hawking's calculation and more general quantum mechanical arguments predict that micro black holes evaporate almost instantaneously. Additional safety arguments beyond those based on Hawking radiation were given in the papers, which showed that in hypothetical scenarios with stable black holes that could damage Earth, such black holes would have been produced by cosmic rays and would have already destroyed known astronomical objects such as the Earth, Sun, neutron stars, or white dwarfs. Further, microscopic black holes generated from a particle accelerator are very small in size and are expected to have a high velocity, making it impossible for them to accrete a dangerously large amount of mass before leaving the earth for good.

13. The World Wide Web was created at CERN Tim Berners-Lee, 1989

14. Sept. 2008: LHC damaged! Pictures below, show two of the most severely broken interconnects, which are between the magnets in LHC sectors three and four. The superconducting magnets, used to direct and focus the proton beams in the experiment, are cooled by liquid helium. An electrical fault caused the liquid helium to leak, resulting in a need for repairs that put the experiment out of action until at least summer 2009.

15. 2011: Currently a success! - Scientific output

16. - Luminosity record

17. - Intrntl. cooperation

18. - Higgs' spotting rumoured as of april 2011

19. Thank you!