Why in news? ‘Ghostly’ neutrinos spotted inside the world’s largest particle accelerator for the first time.

Highlights:

• The tiny particles, known as neutrinos, were spotted by the FASER neutrino detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s largest particle accelerator, located near Geneva, Switzerland.

About Large Hadron Collider

• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), is on the energy frontier of physics research, conducting experiments with highly energised subatomic particles.
• LHC aims for physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics and explains the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces.
• it is the world’s largest science experiment and a collider.
• It accelerates two beams of particles in opposite directions and smashes them head on and these particles are hadrons.
• A hadron is a subatomic particle made up of smaller particles.
• The LHC typically uses protons, which are made up of quarks and gluons.
• The LHC consists of nine detectors that are located over different points on the beam pipe, they study particle interactions in different ways.
• It was the ATLAS and CMS detectors of the Large Hadron Collider that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.

It is also on the quest of understanding of “dark matter”