Scientists at Europe's CERN research center on Thursday dialed up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to a record eight trillion electron volts, or eight TeV, by smashing together millions of protons in the hopes of locating the elusive Higgs boson.
And no, it didn't create a mini-black hole that swallowed the Earth.
It was the first use of the LHC in 2012 and CERN physicists said the collider beat its previous best energy output by 15 percent when they fired four opposing proton beams into each other. An electron volt (eV) is generated when an electron accelerates through an electric potential difference of one volt, gaining energy along the way.
"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," CERN director for accelerators and technology Steve Myers told the BBC after Thursday's successful experiment.
CERN physicists hope to soon be able to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson, the hypothetical elementary particle that could be the key to the existence of matter with mass in the universe. The particle theoretically anchors something called a Higgs field which converts massless fundamental particles traveling through the field into the particles with mass that are the building blocks of atoms.
Scientists said last December that they believe they have narrowed down the likely location of the Higgs boson but have yet to actually find it. To do so, CERN researchers are trying to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang with bigger particle collisions that produce more data to look through.
The boson-hunters at CERN think the production of eight TeV this week could produce as much as ten times the data that they've been able to generate over the past two years of slamming proton beams into each other. Somewhere in that mountain of data could be the so-called God particle.
"It really is a very small window, which has got smaller and smaller," CERN director-general Rolf Heuer told The Christian Science Monitor, describing physicists' belief that the hunt for the Higgs boson will soon be over.
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