Group - Safety of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider

Concerns have been raised in the media, on the Internet and through the law courts about the safety of the particle physics experiments planned to take place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator to date, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, in Switzerland. The claimed dangers of the LHC particle collisions, which are expected to begin mid-November 2009, include doomsday scenarios involving the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets. To address such concerns, CERN mandated a group of independent scientists to review these scenarios. In a report issued in 2003, they concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat. A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN was released in 2008. The report, prepared by a group of physicists not involved in the LHC experiments, reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment. It was reviewed and endorsed by a CERN committee of 20 external scientists and by the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society, and was later published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G by the UK Institute of Physics, which also endorsed its conclusions. The report ruled out any doomsday scenario at the LHC: the physical conditions and events that will be created in the LHC experiments occur naturally in the universe without hazardous consequences. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one of several types of hadrons) with very high kinetic energy. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, in Switzerland. The LHC's main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The first particle collisions at the LHC are planned to take place shortly after startup in November 2009 at 3.5 TeV, once sufficient data has been obtained the machine will continue to run through 2010 at 5 TeV. The LHC will not run at its designed 7 TeV (14 TeV center-of-mass) until after the 2010 shutdown.