LHC ready for new physics discoveries

It took 100 years to discover all the physics particles that have so far been observed. It took the Large Hadron Collider four months.

A view inside Atlas, one of the LHC's two general-purpose experiments. For more on the experiments, take a tour of the Large Hadron Collider. Photo credit: Claudia Marcelloni/Cern

That's the report Monday from the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Paris, where LHC researchers announced they've successfully retraced the steps of earlier particle accelerators. The final step was the likely view of a super-heavy and short-lived particle called the top quark, first seen in 1995 at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator near Chicago.

"They have re-found all the known particles in the standard model," the successful but ultimately insufficient explanation that physicists use to catalog fundamental particles, said Rolf Heuer, director general of the Cern laboratory in Geneva that houses the massive particle accelerator. "The experiments have shown they are ready for new physics once new physics will appear," he told reporters at the conference.

The elusive Higgs boson, a predicted but as yet unobserved particle thought to imbue other particles with mass, remains unseen — but at the present stage of getting the LHC up to speed, that was no surprise. Still, it's clear the Large Hadron Collider, despite its troubled start-up and the fact that it's not expected to run at full power for years, has begun carrying the baton for particle physics.

For more on this story, see LHC firing on all cylinders, but no Higgs boson yet on CNET News.