Record Set for Speedy Protons

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: March 19, 2010

The world’s largest particle accelerator is feeling its oats. Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments. Physicists hope to begin colliding the beams by the end of the month. The machine was designed to accelerate protons to 7 trillion electron volts and crash them together in search of particles and forces last seen in the Big Bang, but it is riddled with thousands of flawed electrical splices and underperforming magnets, which will require a year’s shutdown in 2012 to fix.