LHC Will Operate at 8 TeV Total Output in 2012 [Video]

Officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announce that the Large Hadron Collider will operate at a higher energy level in 2012 than last year. The combined output the particle accelerator will produce will reach 8 teraelectronvolts (TeV), 1 TeV above 2011 levels.

This can be translated into an increase from 3.5 TeV per beam to 4 TeV per beam, which officials say will provide a better chance of actually discovering the Higgs boson – the entire reason why the detector was built in the first place – or at least severely limit its energy range.

At this point, the Higgs can only hide in a very narrow energy range, of only 16 gigaelectronvolts. The largest LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS, are expected to collect a total of 15 inverse femtobarns of data in 2012, which is three times higher than what they managed last year.

After 2012, the LHC will be shut down throughout 2013, as new upgrades are installed. After operations resume in 2014, the machine will attempt to reach its maximum planned energy level, of 7 TeV per beam, or 14 TeV total.