Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is referenced in The Large Hadron Collision, The Porkchop Indeterminacy, The Wiggly Finger Catalyst, and The Cushion Saturation.

Leonard was asked by the university to fill in for Professor Norton to attend a conference and see the CERN Supercollider. As he got to bring a guest, Raj was granted the opportunity to see it with him, after his first and second choices, Penny and Sheldon, respectively, fell ill. Yet, Sheldon has been dreaming of going to the Large Hadron Collider since he was nine years old, thus, Leonard's initial decision created a schism. He even put a commitment in the roommate agreement, stipulating what should happen if either Leonard or himself were able to visit the LHC. According to the Friendship Rider in Appendix C, Future Commitments, Number 37, "in the event one friend is ever invited to visit the Large Hadron Collider, now under construction in Switzerland, he shall invite the other friend to accompany him."

Earlier, Leonard and Raj had discussed if micro-black holes are generated after the high-energy collisions inside the LHC and mocked the doomsday theory where a black hole exponentially grows into an Earth-eating behemoth, destroying all life as we know it.

Sheldon also came close to figuring out why the Large Hadron Collider has yet to isolate the Higgs boson particle, after becoming unburdened by trivial decisions for some time.

After receiving some unrestricted grant money, Leslie Winkle pulled some strings and got Howard on a research trip to Geneva to check out the CERN Supercollider.

About the LHC
An international team has installed the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in a 27-kilometer ring buried deep below the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Its very-high-energy proton collisions are yielding extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Beyond revealing a new world of unknown particles, the LHC experiments could explain why those particles exist and behave as they do. The LHC experiments could reveal the origins of mass, shed light on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe, and possibly find extra dimensions of space.

Billions of protons in the LHC’s two counter-rotating particle beams smash together at an energy of 14 trillion electron volts. After injection into the accelerator, the hair-thin proton beams accelerate to a whisker below the speed of light. They circulate inside for hours, guided around the LHC ring by thousands of powerful superconducting magnets. For most of their split-second journey around the ring, the beams travel in two separate vacuum pipes, but at four points they collide in the hearts of the main experiments, known by their acronyms: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.

The experiments' complex detectors will eventually see up to 600 million collisions per second, as the energy of colliding protons transforms fleetingly into a plethora of exotic particles. In the data from these ultrahigh-energy collisions scientists from universities and laboratories around the world search for the tracks of particles whose existence could transform humankind's understanding of the universe we live in.