Higgs Boson Hadron Collider

The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle smaller than an atom which scientsits believe is about to be spotted, but to detect it requires the world's largest particle accelerator.

The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year. The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion.

One of the places that personifies all of this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where we’ve begun colliding protons at the highest energies ever achieved in a particle accelerator. A few years ago, we broke the old record — 2 TeV (tera-electron-Volts, or 10^12 eV), which was set at Fermilab — by accelerating each particle up to 3.5 TeV and smashing them into one another, achieving 7 TeV of total energy. This discovery enabled us to not only create huge numbers of a great many elusive, fundamental particles (like the top quark, as well as the W-and-Z bosons), but enabled us to discover a brand new fundamental particle and last undiscovered particle in the standard model