CERN issued a press release this morning to announce that the Large Hadron Collider is officially the world’s most powerful atom-smasher,
having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning. This exceeds the previous world record of 0.98 TeV, which had been held by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider since 2001. It marks another important milestone on the road to first physics at the LHC in 2010.
“First physics” seems to mean “actual experiments.” This was just a warm-up. By the time CERN gets serious about crashing teeny tiny particles together to find out what the universe is made of, it’s supposed to be operating at a power level about six times higher.
