CERN Council will be asked at its next December session to confirm the start of the dismantling of the LEP accelerator. The Director-General will also ask Council to strengthen the resources available for the LHC Project in order to accelerate the construction and installation programme of both the machine and the detectors. For LEP's final year of running, CERN's accelerator physicists pulled out all the stops to push the accelerator's energy as high as possible and maximise the chances of a new discovery. Originally foreseen to produce electron-positron collisions at energies up to 200 GeV, LEP achieved a collision energy of 209 GeV this year giving experiments a final chance to explore unknown territory and to continue the hunt for the Higgs boson. This theoretical particle is related to the mechanism thought to be responsible for particle masses.
Some particles are massless, while others have mass and the range of their masses is enormous.
Why this is the case remains a mystery, but would be explained if Higgs bosons exist. Higgs bosons are generated by a field, the Higgs field, that is proposed to fill the whole of space. A particle's mass would be determined by the strength of its interaction with this field. The LHC programme is the fastest and most effective way of observing new physics. Experiments at the new accelerator would be able to observe the Higgs boson in new and complementary ways, that will help reveal whether it accomplishes its anticipated task of giving masses to all other particles.