WHAT IS IT? The biggest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
SIZE: The ring-shaped tunnel is 27 kilometres long, so it would take more than 4 hours to stroll the whole way around. You could squeeze Bermuda, Monaco and four Vatican Cities into the area bounded by the LHC.
LOCATION: Buried over 80 metres underground, straddling the border between France and Switzerland at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva.
WHAT'S IT FOR? Probing the fundamental nature of matter by recreating the conditions that existed shortly after the big bang, and looking for the hypothesised Higgs particle. The LHC will accelerate protons to within a whisker of the speed of light and collide them head on at an energy of up to 14,000 billion electronvolts. That's seven times as much as the energies achieved in today's most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois. ...
18:00 07 October 2008
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