2008: the LHC starts up

The adventure begins.

On 9 September 2008, the first beams circulated inside the Large Hadron Collider, taking the accelerator on a new era of discovery at the high-energy frontier.

LHC experiments address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96% of the Universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the Universe’s existence.