I've been reading a lot about the Large Hadron Collider lately, since it's so close to finally being turned on after decades of planning and 13 years of construction. Some people worry that it will create a mini-black hole that will swallow the Earth, though there have been repeated, exhaustive studies performed to disprove those fears. Just like it was safe to push that mysterious crystal into the beam of the anti-matter spectrometer at Black Mesa.

There's so many fascinating technologies being employed in the project. For example, the sensors will be generating hundreds of petabytes per second of data, which gets processed in real-time by really fast computing farms sitting (out of necessity) only a few meters away, behind radiation shielding. Those computing farms filter the data stream down to about 10 PB/sec of "interesting" data, which is what actually gets stored for processing and analysis.

And fortunately, since the LHC is publicly funded, there's lots of great, freely-available imagery and information available about the project (Also be sure to check out National Geographic's LHC photo set, and this really nice collection of photos).

Many people have seen the impressive pictures of the four detectors themselves:

ALICE, A Large Ion Collider Experiment

ATLAS, A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS

CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid

LHCb, the Large Hadron Collider beauty Experiment

But I came across another image that I found really interesting, if a little less dramatic.

Since I've started working more with electronics, I've become very familiar with the concept of an ampere. Most of the robots I've built deal with electrical currents below 1 amp. Currents in the multiple amp range require you to use heavier wire to handle the load. An automobile starter motor is one of the more current-hungry motors we probably interact with on a day-to-day basis — they often consume over 50 amps, sometimes up to 200 — and the cable that carries power for it is as thick as your finger.

The LHC uses superconducting magnets to bend the particle beam in a circle, and those magnets require hundreds of thousands of amps to run. So how do you carry all that current to a 27-kilometer ring of magnets? It would take a lot of copper cable to handle that kind of load — at the CERN museum, they have a display showing a 12" x 12" bundle of copper wires which can carry 12,500 amps. You'd need about ten of those to handle the load for the LHC magnets.

In that same CERN museum display case, they have a sample of the cable they're actually using at the LHC, made of a superconducting metal called niobium-tin, which needs to be cooled down to about 1.5 K — just barely above absolute zero — to become superconducting. But once you get it there, it's amazing how little of it you need to carry those same 12,500 amps:

Superconductors are impressive.