AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini
Large Hadron Collider: The magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet.

LHC smashes beam collision record. BBC News reports,

Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have moved a step closer to their aim of unlocking the mysteries of the Universe.

The world's highest-energy particle accelerator has produced a record-breaking particle collision rate - about double the previous rate.

The collider is now generating around 10,000 particle collisions per second, according to physicist Andrei Golutvin.

The LHC is housed in a 27km circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border.

The brain-stretching quote: "Protons are complicated particles, they've got quarks, [and other small particles], and colliding them is like colliding two garbage cans and watching carrots come out," (Professor John Ellis) told BBC News.

"The more collisions we get, the closer we get to supersymmetry, dark matter, the Higgs boson and other types of new physics."

CERN,based near Geneva, hopes to have the collider at maximum intensity, 2,808 bunches in a beam, by 2016. "At the moment, it is running at half the energy it was designed for, but the scientists aim to take the machine to the top energy of 14 tera-electronvolt (TeV) per beam by 2013."

The scientists sound equally excited by creating black holes and beating the rival Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab, outside Chicago.

Related: Last week, BBC reported, "Scientists have simulated the sounds set to be made by sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson when they are produced at the Large Hadron Collider."God particle signal is simulated as sound

This is part of the Atlas experiment, a way to help distinguish the "carrots" from other particles:

An instrument inside Atlas called the calorimeter is used for measuring energy and is made up of seven concentric layers.

Each layer is represented by a note and their pitch is different depending on the amount of energy that is deposited in that layer.

You can hear sample audio files at that last link.

Alt-explanations: Deepak Chopra interviewed physicist Amir Aczel, author of the upcoming book Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, in which 13 Nobel Prize Winners tell Aczel what they think will happen when the collider reaches full strength. Aczel walks through what the collider is doing. Chopra follows up with a HuffPost essay, Will the "God Particle" Replace God?