Somewhere under the French-Swiss border, two protons have a date with destiny. Trapped inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, they follow a circular path in opposite directions with velocities very near the speed of light.
The world's biggest particle collider, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), suffered a disastrous failure during its initial startup. After basic repairs, scientists ran it cautiously for a few years, enough time to gather data to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson.
A breakthrough at the University of Maryland could let you squeeze one into a toilet cubicle. Physicists there have managed to accelerate electron beams to nearly the speed of light using record low energies - about the amount consumed by a household light bulb in one millisecond.
Colliding lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider creates tiny samples of matter at energy densities that have not occurred since microseconds after the Big Bang. At these densities, ordinary matter melts into its primordial constituents of quarks and gluons. To explore the properties of this plasma of quarks and gluons as it expands and cools, a new Di-Jet Calorimeter was installed at the collider.
