LHC Jacking Up Power of Proton Beams in Search for Higgs

Scientists hope they'll be able to confirm the Higgs boson's existence by the end of the year.

The operators of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have announced that they're jacking up the power of the proton beams used in subatomic collisions to help them find the elusive Higgs boson once and for all. The team will crank up the proton beams' energy by 14 per cent, which ought to lead to bigger collisions between the subatomic particles that the LHC was designed to investigate. The LHC will be in operation until November of this year, when it will go offline for 20 months to prepare for further exploration. But over the next nine months, the researchers believe that the increased energy – they've steadily ramped up the power of the beams since going live in 2010 – will give them further glimpses of the Higgs boson, the particle that's believed to give matter its mass. Two teams at the LHC announced last December that they believed they had caught glimpses of the boson, but they didn't have enough data to prove the finding conclusively. Hopefully by this time next year, we'll have our answer. That, or a gaping, light-consuming black hole on the Franco-Swiss border.