Published in Physics World, 1 Jan 2010
It may have come online four years late but CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has finally taken up the mantle as the world’s most powerful subatomic-particle smasher. That record was achieved on 9 December when members of the ATLAS experiment glimpsed by chance a handful of 2.36 TeV collisions during test circulations of two proton beams. Within a week the LHC had collided 50 000 protons at this energy, thus cementing a record that was previously held by the Tevatron at Fermilab in the US of 1.96 TeV. The breakthrough marks the beginning of the search for “new physics” at energies beyond the 2 TeV barrier. […]
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