How does an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider work?
Gavin Hesketh, The Conversation
The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator and lies in a tunnel below CERN, the European physics lab just outside Geneva. Ramp: Once the LHC is fully loaded, its two proton beams are slowly accelerated up to collision energy, now a world-record 6.5TeV per beam. The LHC Run 1 (2010-2013) provided enough data to test the Standard Model to new levels of precision and discover the Higgs boson. Run 2 will collide protons at 60% higher energies than Run 1 by pushing the magnets and accelerators to the limit. And with the LHC Run 2 we hope to make it in the lab for the first time.