An Application for Research: the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at CERN was designed and built primarily to find or exclude the existence of the Higgs boson, for which a large amount of data is needed by the LHC experiments. This requires operation at high luminosity, which in turn requires running with thousands of high-intensity proton bunches in the machine. After quantifying the data required by the experiments and elucidating the LHC parameters needed to achieve this, this paper explains how the LHC beams are fabricated from the pulse(s) coming from the CERN Duoplasmatron source. (author)