When its experiments started in earnest earlier this year, many scientists hoped that the world's most powerful collider would turn up new particles, additional dimensions and perhaps even a small black hole or two. But beyond a handful of unusual events, the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are frustrat-ingly ordinary. Based at CERN, Europe's premier high-energy physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland, the LHC accelerates protons to almost the speed of light before slamming them together to create new, heavier particles. For more than a decade, theorists have hoped that the LHC might be powerful enough to generate previously unseen phenomena that would shake the sturdy standard model of particle physics to its core.
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