CERN fires most powerful beams yet

The Large Hadron Collider has fired its most powerful beams yet as scientists crank up the energy used to seek the elusive Higgs Boson particle.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider fired its first proton beams at an intensity of four tera electronvolts (TeV) on Friday, surpassing the previous record of 3.5 TeV, the physics research organisation wrote in a tweet on Monday,

"Record-breaking 4 TeV beams in the #LHC over the weekend (22h40 CET on Friday to be precise)," CERN wrote. "First collisions at 4 TeV planned for April."

For much of 2010 and 2011 CERN was working with beams running at 3.5 TeV, giving collision energies of 7 TeV. CERN will run beams at 4 TeV through to late November, when the facility will be shut down for 20 months. It will restart the LHC in late 2014 with beam intensities of 7 TeV each.

In December CERN announced it had found traces of the Higgs Boson particle in data generated by the LHC. Physicists have nicknamed Higgs Boson the 'God particle', because if it is found it will shed light on how mass works within the Standard Model.