How Large is the LHC?

The purpose of this website is to illustrate the size of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. The LHC is the worlds most powerful particle accelerator. For me, the most significant scientific breakthrough at the LHC is the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

Particle accelerators are huge machines. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometer long beam-pipe. This sounds large but how large is it? Usually, when you see an illustration of the LHC on a map, it's a map of the LHC at its actual location. However, to understand how large the LHC is, it is more instructive to see the LHC ring on a map of your home town.

With this website, you can move the LHC and other (future) colliders on a map to any place on earth.

Ask yourself:

Would Paris fit inside the LHC ring?
Would the SPS fit on to the Faroe Islands?
Could we build the FCC in your neighborhood?

Try it yourself. Go the map view and move the colliders around.

This website will not explain what scientists do at particle accelerators or what the plans for future colliders are. The site is meant as a way to visualize the size of particle accelerators for non-physicists. The size, shape, and location is not entirely accurate. The selection of accelerators and the site of future colliders should not convey any valuation.

This website requires JavaScript. Please use a modern browser and enable JavaScript.