[via mit.edu]

Workers examine a new Quench Protection System at CERN in January. Image courtesy of CERN

In December, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions.

This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons — a factor that will have to be taken into account when physicists start looking for more rarer particles and for the theorized Higgs boson.