Mega tube under Geneva enters race to succeed CERN collider

FILE PHOTO: A technician looks at collision at the CMS experiment in the control room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva April 5, 2012. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo

GENEVA (Reuters) - A proposed 100-km particle accelerator under Geneva has joined an international quest to develop the successor to the Large Hadron Collider to help unlock humankind's knowledge of matter.

The existing collider (LHC), which started up in 2008, smashes protons together in a 27-km circuit beneath the Swiss-French border. It helped scientists discover the long-sought Higgs boson -- a particle that supplied the missing piece of the standard model of physics by explaining why objects have mass.