The Large Hadron Collider starts up

On 10 September 2008 at CERN near Geneva, scientists circulated the first proton beams around the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets buried about 100 metres underground across the French-Swiss border, the largest machine ever built. Nine days later, a faulty electrical connection caused a helium leak and damaged magnets, delaying operation to November 2009. Collisions at 7 trillion electronvolts began in March 2010, and the ATLAS and CMS experiments found the Higgs boson in 2012. The machine cost about 4.75 billion Swiss francs to build and involves more than 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries.

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