Large Hadron Collider sets record

Scientists working at the particle collider successfully accelerated a beam of protons up to 1.18 tera-electron-volts (TeV) late on Sunday night, beating the previous record of 0.98 TeV, Cern has announced. In the early hours of Monday morning, both the clockwise and the counter-clockwise beams were accelerated to 1.18 TeV, giving the protons a speed of approximately 0.9997 times the speed of light.

The previous record for beam intensity was 0.98 TeV, held by the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago since 2001.

"Last night's achievement brings further confirmation that the LHC is progressing smoothly towards the objective of first physics early in 2010," Cern said in a statement on Monday.

For more, read "LHC sets world record for particle acceleration" at ZDNet UK.