The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is a facility at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the French-Swiss border. It is designed to take particles at high energies and smash them together, to see what results are obtained. The energies of interest are above 1 TeV (tera-electron volt), or one million million electron volts.

The LHC was designed for versatility, allowing experiments in high-energy proton-proton collision, proton-electron collision, and collisions of heavy ions such as lead. The latter category of experiments could reach energies of thousands of TeV. In addition, the beam intensity is higher than other colliders of the time, allowing for more possible collision events. With each of these types of experiment, the LHC is designed to test the standard model of quantum mechanics. The heavy-ion collisions can provide particular insight into the nature of the strong nuclear force.

The LHC...