Looking for a Higgs boson in a haystack

The LHC, as we all know, is an immense piece of engineering. And experiments of that size generate equally large volumes of data. Here's a flavour. The LHC – along with the ATLAS and CMS experiments – have seen 6trillion proton-proton collisions. Of these, 5billion were described as 'of interest'. But – emphasising the 'needle in a haystack' nature of fundamental research – only 400 of those collisions got the attention of those searching for concrete evidence of the Higgs boson. Along the way, CERN has, effectively, put more trains on the track. When the accelerator was first fired up, protons circulated the accelerator in bunches separated by 50ns. Towards the end of the run, that gap had been reduced to 25ns. At the peak, CERN said 2748 proton bunches were recorded in each beam at an injection energy of 450GeV and without collisions. More proton bunches at higher energies mean more – and better – collisions and a greater chance of seeing something interesting. The LHC will shortly shut down for maintenance and should come back online in early 2015, when collision energies of 13TeV will be available. Meanwhile, luminosity, said to be a crucial parameter in measuring the rate of collisions of an accelerator, has reached a value of 7.7x10³³cm^-2s^-1; a figure that will also increase when the accelerator starts up again.