Caption: The highest-energy neutrino yet observed, dubbed Ernie, carried 1.14 million billion
electron volts of energy.
The December announcement of particle beam energies in excess of one trillion
electron volts made the LHC the world's highest-energy particle accelerator.
This will detect gamma-ray photons between 30 million
electron volts (MeV) and 50 billion
electron volts (GeV) and will locate celestial sources to within about 10 arcminutes.
The particle's mass is around 125 billion
electron volts, about 133 times the mass of a proton.
The collision occurred at the lowest energy possible in the LHC - each beam had just 450 billion
electron volts (GeV), creating a 900 GeV collision.
The gamma rays studied have very high energies, about a million million
electron volts (1 TeV) per photon.
So the Large Hadron Collider was designed to collide protons with energies exceeding several trillion
electron volts. A Higgs boson created in such collisions would exist too briefly to detect.
The beams were injected at 450 billion
electron volts, only a fraction of the energy that scientists will aim for when they attempt to collide two particle beams.
The telescope will detect gamma-ray photons with energies ranging from 20 million
electron volts (MeV) to 300 billion
electron volts (GeV), an energy span previously studied only by the European COS-B satellite in the 1970s and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory's EGRET telescope in the 1990s.
This subatomic detritus--seen by both ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the LHC--is suggestive of a Higgs boson with a mass of about 125 billion
electron volts (the mass of a proton is about 1 billion
electron volts).
Myers, all of the magnets for the collider were trained to an energy above seven trillion
electron volts before being installed, but when engineers tried to take one of the rings' eight sectors to a higher energy last year, some magnets unexpectedly failed.
The biggest accelerators on Earth can boost particles to energies of about a trillion
electron volts (1 TeV), but nature somehow accelerates a few particles to energies a hundred million times greater.