LHC revs up

Atom smasher achieves most energetic collisions yet

By all accounts, the Large Hadron Collider’s first day of bashing protons was a smashing success. The powerful machine at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, got off to a rocky start on March 30. But by early afternoon (Geneva time), two 3.5 trillion electron volt beams were colliding head-on.

The collisions in the 27-kilometer-long accelerator set a new record for the highest energy crash of subatomic particles.