The Large Hadron Collider, outside Geneva, is the world's most powerful microscope and the best time machine in existence two vacuum realms. The engineering vacuum, which is the portion of the LHC apparatus evacuated of all air molecules. This vacuum system, the largest in the world, consists of three parts. First, the pipes carrying the beams around the accelerator must be emptied in order to reduce extraneous interactions between lingering air and the high-energy protons. The second vacuum surrounds the cryostat apparatus used to cool LHC's thousands of superconducting magnets. The third vacuum system helps insulate the pipes that carry the main coolant, liquid helium to the magnets. These magnets, which deflect the protons into their proper trajectories around the ring, operate without any electrical resistance if they are sufficiently cold. Once the pipes are emptied of air molecules (creating the engineering vacuum), scientists try to fill the physics vacuum with collision-produced daughter particles. The relativistic coldest temperatures anywhere prevail only centimetres away from a place (the collision point) experiencing some of the warmest temperatures- trillions of degrees for some LHC collisions. The goal here, as it is with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) machine at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US, is to study the breakup of large nuclei into their constituent protons and neutrons, and the melting of those protons and neutrons into their constituents, quarks and gluons, into a nuclear liquid referred to as quark-gluon plasma. The vacuum can pose a problem, an obstacle, to the efficient study of heavy- ion collisions at CERN.