n the accident investigations, the cable connections turned out to be a potential

weak point. It would have taken far more than a year to check and repair or even
renew all the connections, so CERN management decided to run the LHC at half power
for the time being to avoid overloading the connections. But even half the energy
was enough to announce the discovery of a new elementary particle on July 4, 2012
with the two large particle detectors ATLAS and CMS. And the LHC continued to run.
In March 2013, the physicists from ATLAS and CMS were finally certain that the
newly discovered particle was indeed the long-sought Higgs particle. More than 50
years ago, in 1964, theoretical physicists Robert Brout, Fran�ois Englert, and
Peter Higgs, among others, published ideas on how elementary
viii Preface
particles can acquire mass, that is, become heavy, and one consequence of their
theories is the existence of a new particle, the Higgs particle, named after Peter
Higgs. This particle was searched for at various particle accelerators and
detectors around the world until the physicists finally found it at the LHC. Brout
had already died in 2011 and could not live to see the triumph, but Englert and
Higgs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in autumn 2013 with great jubilation
and the sympathy of the physicists involved at CERN.