Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex machine ever built, a 27-kilometer particle accelerator beneath the Swiss-French border. Its 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson confirmed the final missing piece of the Standard Model, a triumph that outperforms #2 Hubble by directly probing the fundamental fabric of matter. Operating at energies up to 13 teraelectronvolts, this CERN marvel has generated over 1,000 trillion collisions, each yielding data on particles 100 times heavier than a proton. This unmatched scale and energy make it faster than the average particle collider in revealing new physics, such as evidence for the elusive Z boson and top quark.