Crossing a threshold of particle physics
The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator — a 17-mile loop under the Franco-Swiss border that was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to help scientists answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics.Scientists fired the first beam through the collider in September 2008, but it was not until last week that that the LHC research program formally began. On Tuesday, March 30, scientists sent particles through the LHC and smashed them into one another at a total force of seven Tera electron volts (TeV) — an energy level three-and-a-half times that achieved at any other particle accelerator. The LHC is expected to run for the next 18 to 24 months, generating data that physicists hope will reveal insights into dark matter, new forces and new particles, including the elusive Higgs boson. Markus Klute, MIT assistant professor of physics and member of the...