European particle smashes record

Last weekend, scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) broke their own particle collision record. The scientists say they’ll soon put their American rival, the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois "out of business." The team had successfully increased particle collisions by adjusting the proton beams in the machine so that they had more energy. The LHC is one of the world’s highest-energy particle accelerators which generates 10,000 particle collisions per second. The machine is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva, Switzerland. "The more collisions we get, the closer we get to supersymmetry, dark matter, the Higgs boson and other types of new physics," said Professor John Ellis to the BBC. The Higgs boson (aka "God particle") is a sub-atomic particle which supposedly explains why matter has mass.

BBC