The world"s largest particle accelerator...

The LHC was restarted at the end of February and repeated its record collision energy output of 2.36 tera-electron volts (TeV) on March 8. Scientists plan to force the particles to collide at 7 TeV by the end of March.

The collider will run at 7 TeV through next year, before being shut down in 2012 to upgrade to full design energy of 14 TeV. It will then restart in 2013.

Speaking at a March 8 news conference, Rolf-Dieter Heuer said the LHC could start generating its first scientific breakthroughs into elusive dark matter as early as later this year, even while operating at half-capacity.

"We will open a door for new physics by the end of this year," Heuer told reporters. "It took several decades for us to understand the visible universe. This is all nicely explained by the standard model, but the big problem is that this is only 5 percent of the universe."

"If we can detect and understand dark matter, our knowledge will expand to encompass 30 percent of

Pages: [1] 2 3