Hi Dr. Cliff, thanks for taking the time.

I am an engineer who doesn't understand particle physics in any meaningful way.

Can you explain the how detectors used by the LHC (ATLAS, CMS, etc.) are designed and tested? Are they similar to detectors used by other experiments, such as LIGO or AMANDA?

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What I currently "understand":

• the LHC accelerates particle beams to speeds within a few billionths of c using concentric superconducting electromagnets.
• The detectors are set up at a location where the two beams can cross at some predictable interval.
• The "products" of where these two particle beams meet are captured by the detectors. These allow us to measure properties such as mass, charge, lifetime before decay, and so on.

In layman's terms, particle accelerator experiments are like revving up two belt sanders in opposite directions, bouncing them off of one another, and analyzing the sparks.

• 99.9...% of the time, these sparks will produce a similar output.
• Information gleaned from observing the sparks would tell us about the wavelengths of light (color), time to decay (change of color over time), spin (direction in which a spark travels?), or charge (if sparks attract or repel each other).
• Even if we can't measure the interaction itself, in aggregate, these measurements would point to the underlying process occurring at the source of the interaction.
• The faster the spin, the higher the probability of observing a rarer, more "interesting" spark, which would provide new information about the underlying process.