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Large Hadron Collider Turns Up the Heat in Higgs Hunt

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, already the most powerful particle collider in history—and by a wide margin at that—is about to break its own record.

The collider outside Geneva will run at an energy of 4 trillion electron-volts (TeV) in 2012, up from 3.5 TeV in 2011, CERN announced February 13. (CERN is the European physics laboratory that operates the LHC.) The collider accelerates beams of protons to fantastic energies before smashing them together head-on. Those collisions take place inside colossal detectors that can register short-lived particles in the debris that are rare in everyday, low-energy life. With the increased energy of the beam and continued improvements in luminosity (the rate of collisions), LHC scientists are aiming to take three times as much collision data this year as was captured in 2011.

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(via aninterestingdebate)