CERN powers up Large Hadron Collider in final search for Higgs Boson

Beam energy to hit four teraelectron volts as organisation hopes for discovery in 2012

CERN's has announced it will increase the power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to four teraelectron volts (TeV) this year, a 0.5 TeV bump from 2010 and 2011, in an attempt to find the elusive Higgs Boson before the machine is switched off for 20 months.

The increased power will help the organisation gather as much data as possible about the possible existence of the so-called God particle before the machine is shut down in preparation for experiments running at seven TeV in late 2014.

CERN said increasing the power of the particle beam should help it either prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs Boson by the end of the year.

Experiments in 2011 appeared to narrow down its existence to between the mass ranges of 124-126 gigaelectron volts (GeV).

"By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs," said CERN's research director, Sergio Bertolucci.

"Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

CERN's director for accelerators and technology, Steve Myers, added that the organisation was confident the increased collision energy would not have an adverse effect on the LHC, which has suffered issues before.

"Two good years of operational experience with beam and many additional measurements made during 2011 give us the confidence to safely move up a notch, and thereby extend the physics reach of the experiments before we go into the LHC's first long shutdown," he added.

CERN's experiments are increasingly pushing the frontiers of human's knowledge of the world of physics, with experiments in 2011 apparently discovering that particles, known as neutrinos, can travel faster than the speed of light, although the results are still being treated with caution.

A visit to the CERN site by V3 in 2011 also discovered that the organisation's experiments in the LHC are generating one petabyte of data per second.