[photon]

Seems the LHC is now cooled to operational temperature, 1.9°K, colder than outer space! Pretty soon they can make with the smashy smashy.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/...m_campaign=rss

The LHC is built to accelerate particles to a speed that's so close to that of light that, for most of us, the difference could be considered a rounding error. That's fast enough that particles will run over 11,000 laps around the 27km circumference each second. Obviously, that creates a number of engineering challenges.
For one, you can't afford to have much else in the path of the particle beam, so the entire thing has to be run in a vacuum—the LHC will have an vacuum that's 10 times less dense than the atmosphere of the moon. The other challenge is that these particles will have a very strong tendency to travel in a straight line. To get them to actually run in a curved path, the LHC relies on an enormous collection of exceptionally powerful magnets to curve and focus the beam.
That's where the low temperatures come in, as the magnets require superconductive wiring to generate an appropriately strong magnetic field. That also requires prodigious amounts of electric current, which can only be delivered by wires that are also superconducting. (So much current is involved, in fact, that the LHC's operational schedule is built around the European energy supply.)