Energy is building at the Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, in more ways than one.
The particle accelerator geared up for the highest-energy particle collisions ever produced and physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and around the world are excited to begin looking for evidence of new particles and other unexplained physics phenomena.
On Tuesday, March 30, the LHC attempted the first collisions at 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) between two proton beams of 3.5 TeV each. These beams, first circulated in the machine on March 19, set a record for the highest energies yet reached in a particle accelerator.
The project involved Sau Lan Wu, a UW-Madison physics professor who leads a group of American scientists working on one of the collider's main detectors, and physics professor Wesley Smith, who is helping lead work on another of the collider's main detectors
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