SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Large Hadron Collider to Run Through the Year

from the Times (London)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start smashing its first protons in October and run through the winter to keep it ahead in the international race to find the elusive "God particle," the project's leader said today.

The CERN laboratory's unprecedented decision to operate the £4bn particle accelerator all year round makes it very unlikely that the LHC will be beaten to the discovery of the Higgs boson, even after a serious fault forced a year-long shutdown, Lyn Evans told The Times.

The delay has raised the prospect that a less powerful American accelerator, at Fermilab in Illinois, might be first to find the particle that is predicted to give matter its mass. Fermilab's Tevatron collider has recently narrowed down the search and some of its scientists hope they might find hints of the boson next year.