Physicists are rewriting computer code so that detectors can cope with and triage data from the hundreds of millions of collisions that occur every second.
The world's largest particle accelerator is roaring along at an unprecedented pace, delivering torrents of data to its physicist handlers. But the hundreds of millions of collisions happening inside the machine every second are now growing into a thick fog that, paradoxically, threatens to obscure a fabled quarry: the Higgs boson.
The problem is known as pile-up, and it promises to be one of the greatest challenges this year for scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's main high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
Huge amounts of computing power, cunning software and technical tricks are helping scientists to stay ahead of the problem. But researchers may still need to scale back the collisions to find the long-sought Higgs, the manifestation of a field that is believed to confer mass on other particles.
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