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The discovery of the Higgs Boson was almost as impressive as the theory that predicted its existence due to the immense precision that is required in observing it's existence. The Higgs Boson was discovered by the ATLAS detector at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider on July 4, 2012 through two experiments. They found a particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c^2 that behaved like the Higgs Boson was predicted to. The Large Hadron Collider is an engineering masterpiece in order to accomplish the great feat that it did.


long tube magnets

The Large Hadron Collider

The collider weighs more than 747 airplane jets and contains over 1800 mile of cables. But what exactly is the LHC? The LHC is a particle accelerator which means that it is able to launch small particles such as protons near the speed of light and watch what happens when they collide. The particles are accelerated in tubes kept at a "ultrahigh vacuum", a vacuum similar to that of space, through the use of a strong magnetic field generated by superconducting electromagnets. These magnets are cooled to temperatures within a couple of degrees of absolute zero with a liquid helium system. The size and amount of these magnets is what is used to direct these high energy beams into a path for collision.