A proton beam pushed from 0.45 to 6.5 TeV barely changes speed: it merely hugs the light-speed ceiling and grows a few more nines, because the extra energy goes into momentum rather than velocity. The 27 km LHC ring keeps two counter-rotating beams on course with dipole magnets that bend and quadrupoles that focus. When the beams meet head-on at roughly 13 TeV, that enormous kinetic energy turns into a shower of new particles whose tracks curve one way or the other by charge in the detector field.
A proton beam pushed from 0.45 to 6.5 TeV barely changes speed: it merely hugs the light-speed ceiling and grows a few more nines, because the extra energy goes into momentum rather than velocity. The 27 km LHC ring keeps two counter-rotating beams on course with dipole magnets that bend and quadrupoles that focus. When the beams meet head-on at roughly 13 TeV, that enormous kinetic energy turns into a shower of new particles whose tracks curve one way or the other by charge in the detector field.
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