Natural History Magazine:
Experimenters working with both kinds of dark-matter detectors know that a formidable competitor looms on the horizon. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, just outside Geneva, is now scheduled to begin serious operation in mid-2008. Once up and running, the LHC will be the world’s biggest particle accelerator. Dug several hundred feet under the Swiss and French countryside, it will accelerate two clumps, or “beams,†of particles many times around a ring more than five miles across, before smashing the two beams into each other.