Secular Café: LHC roaring back!

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LHC roaring back! Apr 6th 2012, 03:03 Exciting times! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17625123 Quote: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is operating again after its winter break. Early on Thursday, opposing stable beams of protons were smashed into each other at four observation positions. The total collision energy in these bunches of sub-atomic particles was eight trillion electron volts - a world record. Scientists expect the big boost in capability to significantly increase the collider's chances of discovering "new physics". The great expectation is that they will definitively confirm or deny the existence of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that would help explain why matter has mass. "The experience of two good years of running at 3.5 TeV per beam gave us the confidence to increase the energy for this year without any significant risk to the machine," explained Steve Myers, the director for accelerators and technology at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research)... ...It is planned that the collider will collect data until November, after which it will be upgraded during a shutdown period that will last 20 months. That should result in an operating proton beam energy of 14 trillion electronvolts, or teraelectronvolts - another great leap in capability.

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