As a physicist for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, Andrei Golutvin spends his days smashing subatomic particles into one another at the Large Hadron Collider, a 16.8-mile ring of superconducting magnets buried 328 feet under Switzerland arid France. The high-energy collisions of his experiment, one of four currently under way at the LHC, hint at the answers to some of nature's greatest mysteries-and generate about 20 billion data points each year. Searching the enormous archive for collisions that match specific criteria can take hours.
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