It has already broken the record for the most energetic particle collisions, but the world's largest particle smasher is boosting its energy still further. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider hope this will confirm or rule out tantalising hints of the elusive Higgs particle.
Although the Higgs is the LHC's main quarry, the biggest advantage from the boost in energy goes to searches for signs of supersymmetry, or SUSY. Many researchers had hoped that by now this elegant theory would have left traces in LHC, which is at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
The LHC has already seen many events that could be signs of the decay of the long-sought Higgs boson, which is thought to endow other particles with mass. But more mundane reactions can also produce such events, so more experiments are needed to confirm or rule out the Higgs explanation.
Now the LHC's management has decided to boost the energy of collisions to get a better chance of flushing the Higgs out into the open.
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