Large Hadron Collider

Scientists say they have successfully restarted the world’s biggest particle collider after a two-year shutdown and upgrade and it’s now producing almost double the collision energy of its first run. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said on Wednesday the Large Hadron Collider will now run around the clock for the next three years. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex.

The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum.

They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to 271.3°C – a temperature colder than outer space.

For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services. On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model.

The Higgs boson (or Higgs particle) is a particle that gives mass to other particles. Peter Higgs was the first person to think of it, and the particle was found in March 2013. It is part of the Standard Model in physics, which means it is found everywhere, thus came to be known as God Particle. On October 8, 2013 the Nobel prize in physics(link is external) was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs.