The LHC is an international collaborative project funded by more than 2,000 physicists from universities and laboratories in 34 countries.
The LHC consists of a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometers, located between 50 and 150 meters below the ground due to the local topography. The tunnel, which is a reuse of a tunnel previously used for the Large Electron Positron Accelerator (LEP), is three meters in diameter, lies on the same plane, and runs across the Swiss-French border, with most of the main portion located in France. Although the tunnel itself is underground, there are many above-ground facilities such as cooling compressors, ventilation equipment, control motors, and refrigeration tanks built into it.
The gas pedal tunnel houses two proton beam tubes. The tubes are covered by superconducting magnets and cooled by liquid helium. The protons in the tubes are traveling in opposite directions around the entire ring-type gas pedal. In addition, other bias and focusing magnets are installed near the four experimental collision points.
Five detectors are located in the crypts of each of the four collision sites at the LHC. One of them, the Ultra Toroidal Surface Instrument (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Coil (CMS), are general-purpose particle detectors. The other three (the LHC bottom quark detector (LHCb), the Large Ion Collider (ALICE), and the Total Elasticity Scattering Detector (TOTEM)) are smaller special target detectors.