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Computer screens at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) control centre of the CERN - Source: Reuters -
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The "Big Bang" experiment at CERN has set new records for colliding beams of particles this week, and is now shutting down for a couple of months to prepare for even higher energy work, the research centre said.
The collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are part of an experiment to recreate conditions immediately after the Big Bang at the start of the universe to understand the nature of matter.
"This first running period has served its purpose fully: testing all the LHC's systems, providing calibration data for the experiments and showing what needs to be done to prepare the machine for a sustained period of running at higher energy," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said.
"We could not have asked for a better way to bring 2009 to a close," he said in a statement.
Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) collided beams at 2.36 tera-electron volts (TeV), a new record crowning operations of the world's most powerful particle accelerator since it was relaunched in November.
One TeV is about the energy carried by a mosquito in flight, but when it is concentrated on a single sub-atomic particle it is much more forceful.
CERN set the previous record on November 30, after circulating the first beams on November 23 around its 27-km tunnel deep under the French-Swiss border outside Geneva.
That overturned a record of 1.96 TeV for a collision, or just under one TeV for a single beam, set by a collider at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
When CERN's Large Hadron Collider - the world's biggest machine - is working at full strength it will send beams round the tunnel at 7 TeV for collisions of 14 TeV.
The collider has now been put on standby and will restart in February 2010 following a short technical stop to prepare for higher-energy collisions and the start of the main research programme.
The collider was initially started in September 2008 but was shut down 10 days later following an accident.
