LHC@home

LHC@home is a volunteer computing project operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, capable of colliding protons at energies up to 13.6 TeV, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The project runs several distinct applications. SixTrack simulates the trajectories of individual protons as they circulate through the LHC's magnetic lattice, tracking their positions over millions of orbits to identify beam instabilities that could cause particle losses. This is critical for the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade (HL-LHC), which will increase collision rates tenfold. CMS Simulation and ATLAS Simulation use virtualization technology to run full Monte Carlo simulations of particle collision events for CERN's two general-purpose detectors, generating the simulated data needed to compare theoretical predictions with experimental observations.

The LHC's most celebrated achievement was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS and CMS experiments — a particle whose existence was predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs, François Englert, and others. This discovery confirmed the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, which explains how fundamental particles acquire mass through interaction with the Higgs field. Higgs and Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for this theoretical prediction.

LHC@home allows anyone with a computer to contribute to humanity's deepest explorations of matter and the fundamental forces of nature. The project provides a direct connection between ordinary volunteers and the frontier of particle physics research.