CERN Makes Data from LHC Experiment Public
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) has recently launched Open Data Portal in which data produced by experiments at LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will be made public for the first time. It is believed that this data will be very useful for research community as well as for education. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is world's largest and most powerful partical accelerator. The LHC consist of 27 kilometers rings of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the LHC, particles like protons are accelerated at 99.9999% at the speed of light which is 299,792,458 meters per second. With that speed, they go around eleven thousand times per second in that 27 kilometer ring and collide with another beam of proton travelling with the same speed in the opposite direction. The collision creates mini bigbang inside the ring. This will help scientists know about the creation of the universe and its behavior. People can access the data through CERN’s Open Data Portal website. The users will need Linux platform to download and use the software to view the data. This is the first time that the data from the LHC is being shared. The first high-level and analyzable data shared is from CMS (Compact Meuon Solenoid) experiment. The CERN Open Data portal provides entrance to burgeoning range of data produced through the researche done at CERN. It assists in the circulation of the preserved output from various research activities. Further, it also provides required software and documentation to understand and analyze the data being shared. All data on opendata.cern.ch are shared under Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication; data and software are assigned unique DOI identifiers to make them citable in scientific articles; the software is released under open source licenses. "Launching the CERN Open Data Portal is an important step taken by our organization. Data from the LHC program are among the most precious assets of the LHC experiments that we’ve today start sharing openly with the world. We hope the open data will support and inspire the global research community, including students and citizen scientists," says CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. Now the world has access to data which holds the answers to questions like “Why does the universe exist?”, “How it all started?”, “Why does the universe behave in the way it is behaving?” and many more pertinent questions.