The Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs boson
- Date
- 10 September 2008
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Europe
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometre circular particle accelerator straddling the Franco-Swiss border at CERN near Geneva, first circulated proton beams on 10 September 2008.
The largest and most powerful machine ever built, it collides protons at near-light speeds to probe the fundamental structure of matter. On 4 July 2012, the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments jointly announced the discovery of a new particle with a mass of about 125 gigaelectronvolts, consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs particle had been predicted in 1964 as the manifestation of a field that gives mass to elementary particles, completing the Standard Model of particle physics. Its detection, after a search lasting nearly half a century, was hailed as a landmark in the history of science and led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for Peter Higgs and François Englert. Built and operated by an international collaboration of thousands of scientists, the LHC also exemplified large-scale 'big science' and contributed technologies, including advances that grew out of CERN's earlier invention of the World Wide Web.
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Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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