The title might not sound terribly exciting if you’re not a physicist, but this is the main reasons the Large Hadron Collider was built in the first place to collide elementary particles at extremely high levels of energy, which would help physicists test some predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson.
Two pivotal achievements happened today: First, the LHC finally managed to sustain a 7 TeV particle beam. Secondly, the first proton collides were achieved at this level of energy, which is a world record.
With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson. The fact that the experiments have published papers already on the basis of last year’s data bodes very well for this first physics run, said ATLAS Collaboration Spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.
