The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator ever built. Located near Geneva, Switzerland, and operated by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), it lies in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel buried about 100 meters underground.
The LHC accelerates protons and heavy ions to near the speed of light and smashes them together to recreate conditions similar to those just after the Big Bang. These high-energy collisions allow physicists to study the fundamental particles and forces that make up the universe.
One of its most famous achievements was the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, a particle crucial to explaining why other particles have mass. The LHC uses superconducting magnets cooled to near absolute zero and operates with incredible precision and energy levels (up to 13–14 TeV).
Its experiments (like ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb) help scientists investigate dark matter, antimatter, and the early universe, making it a cornerstone of modern physics research.