Large Hadron Collider will take risks to run at 8 trillion electron volts instead of 7 to increases chances to find Higgs and SUSY

CERN1 today announced that the LHC will run with a beam energy of 4 TeV this year, 0.5 TeV higher than in 2010 and 2011. This decision was taken by CERN management following the annual performance workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the external CERN Machine Advisory Committee (CMAC).

The Large Hadron Collider managers have decided to increase the energy of collisions to 4 TeV per beam, for a total energy of 8 TeV. Last year, the LHC smashed two beams of protons together at an energy of 3.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) each, resulting in collisions with a total energy of 7 TeV.

Running at 8 instead of 7 TeV should boost the machine’s sensitivity to Higgs particles – assuming they are really there – by 30 to 40 per cent, says Greg Landsberg of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who is involved in CMS, one of the LHC’s two main detectors.

The decision is described in this 61 page powerpoint

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