The term hadron refers to subatomic composite particles composed of quarks held together by the strong force (analogous to the way that atoms and molecules are held together by the electromagnetic force).

The LHC first went live on 10 September 2008, but initial testing was delayed for 14 months from 19 September 2008 to 20 November 2009, following a magnet quench incident that caused extensive damage to over 50 superconducting magnets,

After some years of running, any particle physics experiment typically begins to suffer from diminishing returns: as the key results reachable by the device begin to be completed, later years of operation discover proportionately less than earlier years. A common

Many physicists hope that the Large Hadron Collider will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the basic

The collider is contained in a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 26.7 kilometres (16.6 mi), at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres (164 to 574 ft) underground. The variation in depth was deliberate, to reduce the amount of tunnel that lies under the

An initial focus of research was to investigate the possible existence of the Higgs boson, a key part of the Standard Model of physics which was predicted by theory, but had not yet

The experiments at the Large Hadron Collider sparked fears that the particle collisions might produce doomsday phenomena, involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.